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3232Chris Denny – The Engine is Redhttps://connexdigitalmarketing.com/chris-denny/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/chris-denny/#respondMon, 04 Dec 2017 12:46:34 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28607Chris Denny is the founder of The Engine is Red.
With a background in both design and entrepreneurship, Chris Denny founded The Engine is Red in 2008. Chris leads the Engine team—developing inspired brand strategies, campaigns, and interactive experiences for national and regional clients. Chris and the Engine have been featured by a variety of media, including Entrepreneur, Inc 5000, AdAge, Adweek, USA Today, and CNN Money.

With a background in both design and entrepreneurship, Chris Denny founded The Engine is Red in 2008. Chris leads the Engine team—developing inspired brand strategies, campaigns, and interactive experiences for national and regional clients. Chris and the Engine have been featured by a variety of media, including Entrepreneur, Inc 5000, AdAge, Adweek, USA Today, and CNN Money.

Show transcript

With a background in both design and entrepreneurship, Chris Denny founded The Engine is Red in 2008. Chris leads the engine team, developing inspired brand strategies, campaigns, and interactive experiences for national and regional clients. Chris and the Engine had been featured by a variety of media, including Entrepreneur, Inc. 5000, Ad Age, Adweek, USA Today, and CNN Money.

Paul Kortman: Fill in the missing details from that intro and tell us something about your personal life.

Chris Denny: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here and get to know you and share a little bit of our story. I’m just kind of a weirdo that fell in love with creative and can’t seem to shake it. I live here in northern California. While I spend a lot of time at the agency, I actually spent a lot of my time outside of work. I have two young kids and they’re kind of the highlight of my day. But I’m excited to be here.

Paul Kortman: What is your agency’s top line revenue?

Chris Denny: We’re a little bit different in that. I’m sure you’ll get to dive into that a little bit this week as we talk through some of it. But we only charge for creative services. So we don’t charge any media or production through the agency at all. All of our clients direct build. So our top line revenue is kind of mid-line of a lot of other agencies. And this year we’ll build just north of 2 million.

Paul Kortman: What’s the typical price to work with you (Median or Average)?

Chris Denny: It’s really pretty widely varied. We have no technical minimums. There are times when we have clients, either for a very short term engagement like a startup or a nonprofit, that are engaging us just in two or three day projects. That would really be on the smallest end and that’s probably south of $10000. We have other Fortune 100 companies that work with a dedicated team, essentially on a weekly basis. They’re building well into the six figures a year. Probably the high side of that would be in the $400,000 range. I would say that our median or most common is either project work in the $40,000 to $100,000 range or maybe some shorter term things, but it’s pretty widely varied.

Paul Kortman: Describe your staff/team, how many do you have? What are their specialties?

Chris Denny: So we have a little bit of a blended team. We have two main studios: one here in northern California where I’m based. We have a second studio in Minneapolis, and then beyond that we have full timers, permalancers, and contractors that are remote. So like in Berkeley, South Bay, San Francisco, as well as far away as Finland, the U.K., and Canada. We structure our teams based on craft. We have a really strong creative department of writers, storytellers, designers, art directors, then we have a really strong strategy that leads a lot of our client communications, project management strategy work, and then we have a significantly talented development team, so engineers & programmers on the software side, everything from front-end web development to iOS. I would say for a full time equivalent if you’re taking those permalancers and full timers in, we’re right around 18 right now. Although that does shift as projects come and go

Paul Kortman: How many of those 18 are not salaried employees but are contractors? How much of your labor costs are contractors?

Chris Denny: Of the daily 18, 6 are contractors. Some of those just have to do with international laws, where it’s hard to have a full time employee with the EU and things like that. Others have a small shop of their own and they love taking care of their own clients, so it’s kind of a mix. And then beyond that, we bring in specialists either based on a particular skill set or need, like illustration or a certain type of UI or UX or a certain technology stack, or just because our team is over capacity and we need an extra set of hands. So on any given day, we could have another six or eight additional freelancers or contractors above that core. And that wave kind of comes and goes based on what we’re working on or how much. And then from a labor cost question, all we are is our team. We’re pretty lean in terms of overhead. We don’t have huge studios here in northern California. We’re about 4000 square feet, about another thousand square feet in Minneapolis. So we don’t have a ton of overhead, so labor costs are for sure our largest investment. We fight to be really competitive with both our in-house talent as well as our partners, so we tend to invest pretty heavily there.

Paul Kortman: What’s the average salary of your employees?

Chris Denny: I mean I want to be respectful of the team and where they’re at in their careers and not podcast W-2s out. But one of the really big values we have here as an agency is transparency, as well as alignment. So all of us earn exactly the same way. We don’t pay any commissions for certain departments like media or new business. We don’t pay hourly for some and exempt for others. Of the 12 of us, nine of us are exempt employees, and three are not exempt and eligible for hourly and overtime, but we tend to pay everybody similarly. So what I can share is that from a salary perspective we push to be competitive and that’s kind of tough as a small independent shop, particularly in the Bay Area, because we’re competing with a lot of non-revenue generating startups that are not tied to profitability, which is exciting. I think they’ve invested a lot in our community but it can make it tough to find talent. So we take a look at base salary as a big component of compensation. We also focus heavily on benefits. We really believe that to produce your best work inside the studio you have to be living a really full and healthy life outside the studio, and as a team, benefits play a big role in that . So we invest in health care, dental and vision, also wellbeing and health, life insurance, all those things. We also try to help young folks plan for their future. So we have a 401k and financial management program here at the studio, as well as starting to look out at 2018 we’ll be looking at student loan repayment benefits as well. And then on top of that, trying to keep the team completely unified and invested together, we actually have a 25% profit share as well, so 25% of all the profits of the agency are actually distributed to the full team.

Paul Kortman: So can you give us a range, like are we talking $40000, $75000?

Chris Denny: Yeah, all of those. Depending on where you’re at and depending on your location and the cost of living of your area as well. Your entry levels are in the $40000s. I would say that a lot of our staff is in the $60-70,000 range, and senior leadership can definitely break into the six figures.

Paul Kortman: What is your employee’s percent billable time?

Chris Denny: Yeah. So our model and workflow and the way that we engage with clients is a little bit different. We don’t do time sheets or hourly billing. We don’t do retainers and we don’t do scopes of work. So it’s a little bit different than a traditional agency. The core of the way that we charge, the way that we manage, and the way that we self-lead is based on assigning a small dedicated team to a project over weekly spans or sprints. So we build by the day and schedule by the week. So the smallest unit of engagement is a full day’s worth of effort over a week.

Paul Kortman: And then that’s multiplied by how many team members are involved?

Chris Denny: Yeah. So let’s say that we are working with you to explore some prototyping for a mobile application. We would say that’s that’s probably ideally a team of two days of a creative director, four days of a UI/UX designer, maybe we want to have a consulting iOS developer one day that week just to make sure that it’s all there. Maybe two days of a UX writer, and they based on their hourly rates, you would have a weekly fee for that team and then you can decide how many weeks it’ll take for the initial project.

Paul Kortman: How many clients does your agency have?

Chris Denny: We try to focus in a more dedicated fashion, so on any given day, we’re trying to work with the least number of clients as possible to give each one the most attention. But that said, that means that we’ll typically finish a project much faster than a traditional timeline, and then move on to the next client. So on any given day, the full engine staff is probably only serving about six or seven clients total across the agency, but we’ll probably serve just north of 40 throughout the year.

Paul Kortman: What verticals or industries are your clients in?

Chris Denny: It’s really varied. We tend to more align with clients in terms of culture, just as to what area they are at in their organization and what they value, as well as where they are in their life cycle. We tend to join clients either in a season of launch or a season of pivot, either watching a new channel or product or brand, either at program or product level or on a whole organization, or they’re in a place of significant change and evolution. Because we align there, we tend to dive into lots of different industries, so everything from a great cupcake brand to very technical bio life sciences and beyond. But we do have a couple of verticals that probably cluster a little bit more than is typical. We do a lot in energy and renewable energy. Also wine and beverage is a big passion for ours. Our studio is located here in Sonoma County, so obviously being in wine country is pretty inspiring. We also do a lot in financial services and consumer finance, and then bio-life sciences and healthcare is a big one for us. We do work with quite a few innovators there, as well as government and nonprofit work. But I’m already thinking of four or five clients that don’t fit in those.

Paul Kortman: So you know I do have to chuckle a little bit here, living in Sonoma Valley, living around vineyards and around wine people. It’s inspiring. Is that just shorthand for you drink wine at the office.

Chris Denny: Yeah, we do drink wine in the office quite a bit. And I find it very inspiring, this mix of agriculture and craft as well science makes some really good neighbors. It’s really inspiring.

Paul Kortman: What services do you offer for your clients?

Chris Denny: It depends on where you’re at, what you need, and where your goals are. But basically what we will be doing is giving you access to a really talented team on the creative side. So writing, design, art direction, UI/UX, as well as being able to dream in code. So everything from front-end PHP to pretty sophisticated ERP and database integration work, custom web applications and software all the way into mobile. And then you’ll be supported by our accounts and strategy teams to help you not just execute the work but identify where you should be focusing, how, and why.

Paul Kortman: So can they be exclusive of each other?

Chris Denny: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re really transparent and intimate with how we collaborate with our clients, so there are definitely times where a client is saying, stay inside these guardrails, here’s the the parameters of the project, and we really only serve them there. There are other times like collaborating in an app that we for sure do. So we will work with some clients where they have an internal development and engineering team that’s actually doing a lot of the builds of a larger technical project, but they’re using our team for the user experience, so design and prototyping on the front-end is us, and we’re collaborating with them, and we’re even sometimes embedded sitting side-by-side day-to-day working on that. So there’s definitely places where clients will leverage our content and design teams but not use our interactive development team, either because of the scope of the project or because they have that talent in-house.

Paul Kortman: Which of those services are does your agency specialize in?

Chris Denny: I would say that there’s two. One, I think that we really enjoy and fight really hard to help brands really break through and tell their story, to get past the nearsighted and creative really engaging strategic and emotional story, they’re at a campaign or a branch level, and really help that come to life to something that is evocative and memorable and effective. And then secondly, our team loves a deep technical challenge, so dreaming and creating things in code that really move the needle is exciting, and especially if it kind of engages the faulty and ties everything together. But those are the two areas that I would say that we’re probably the strongest.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good clients?

Chris Denny: We’re really lucky. Because we don’t work with a huge number of clients and we focus on staying as a tight team, we’re somewhat particular about who we work with and that’s helped. So we have some of the world’s best clients, I think, and they tend to talk to their friends a lot. So the vast majority of our clients come from word-of-mouth and referrals. We also have really high client retention. A lot of the collaborators we’re working with have been with us for years. But we also get to do things like this and meet people like you and share our story. But as of now it’s really been relationship and work-driven.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s ideal client.

Chris Denny: Our ideal client is a team who is amazingly dedicated to what they do. They are pushing the boundaries and rethinking how they serve their customers and clients. And our ideal of ideal client is someone who is starting to break into some some significant success in there, almost in spite of their brand, their story, and their communication. And then we can partner with them and mutually respect and bring their expertise into the creative process and take them from this emerging place into a spot of market leadership by really helping them overhaul how they view the world, how they talk to their potential clients, how they position and establish themselves. So bringing in people who are far smarter than us into a creative process and really taking it to the next level.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s worst client.

Chris Denny: For us, the way that we’re built and our culture, there are certain types of CMOs that really we’re just not a fit for. If you’re a brand or a marketer that has a very specific vision in mind of what you’re hoping to have created, but you just don’t have the bandwidth or the skill-set in-house to get that done, and you’re really hoping to just commission the execution of an existing vision or idea, we’re probably not a good fit. I think that we’ll ask too many questions and probably push too many things. But that type of telepathic customized commissioned illustration, our team is just not very good at.

Paul Kortman: What’s the worst part of your job? Why?

Chris Denny: I would say that the worst part of my job is that I sometimes struggle with time management and can say yes to too many things, and while I’m working on that, sometimes that means that I’m the one standing in the way of a creative team really nailing their goals, because they’re waiting on me for a specific document or strategy or my counters holding them back. So on the days as an agency leader when I can identify that I personally am a challenge for my team to overcome really sucks at a guttural level, so I’m constantly working on that. But holding my team up and standing in the way is definitely the worst part of my job.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good staff?

Chris Denny: One, at least in today’s economy, it’s hard to find good people because there’s just so much opportunity in the workforce. And I’m excited for that. As a creative, we’ve built our agency at the pinnacle of the downturn. I’m excited to see creatives have some new job opportunities, but it does make it a little bit tougher to find available teams. But for us I think it comes down to just three different areas. One, we trust our team. I think that, particularly for experienced creatives, being in an agency environment where they’re questioned or micromanaged or disempowered can be devastating to your creative path. So we only hire talented and trustworthy people, and then we treat them with that respect and let them design their own path and lead their own way and ask the big questions and kind of be there. Secondly, we try to take care of them in terms of their life, from time-off to finances to benefits. While we’re probably not the highest paying agency, we definitely support the full lives of our clients. It’s pretty rare for the studio to the full past 6:00 p.m., because we think they need to get home and get rest, and because we don’t do billable hours, we’re not fighting for you to squeeze out another half hour. We’re fighting for you to produce your best and strongest day. And then lastly, we just try to take really good care of our staff, from professional development to listening to them and helping them problem solve. Where we’re headed has a lot to do with where they’re headed.

Paul Kortman: How do you staff a project?

Chris Denny: We work in smaller dedicated teams. So instead of having one bench across the whole agency and rearranging that every time, we have small clusters of designers, writers, creative director, account manager, and they’re working together side-by-side, day-by-day, and as a whole team they’ll go from one project to the next. That allows them to learn each other’s flows, to kind of customize their own creative process and communication. So as a new project comes in, we’ll take a look at which teams are available, and we’ll either try to decide that based on location or on specific experience, which staff is the best for them, and we’ll offer that to the client, but then we’ll also offer them whoever is available to start this. Because we don’t work on very many things simultaneously, sometimes scheduling becomes a question.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer continued training to your staff? What does that look like?

Chris Denny: So we encourage training and professional development on a variety of things. We give education and inspiration budgets on a quarterly basis. We also have do continuing education reimbursement for individual classes, like a general assembly, although it’s a two to four year institution, and then we’re also looking for ways to do research and development internally, to give a team member maybe a week off of client work to invest in personal projects or to go further. And then we also do a lot of coaching internally on topics like leadership and communication on intent. And then we encourage our teams to cross train in different departments. If you’re a writer, spend some time working on strategy. If you’re a designer, spend some time doing front-end development. Even if that’s just from a place of empathy and compassion it’s good to kind of be multi-disciplinary.

Paul Kortman: What do you do when a team member/staff fails at a project or their job?

Chris Denny: All of us fail. I mean all of us will. If we’re not, then we’re playing it too safe. If we’re constantly striving and pushing, failure will become a regular part of our job. The first thing that we do is we take care of them. We let them know that failure is OK here. It’s expected and it’s a part of who we are. It’s not about preventing failure. It’s about getting good at it and being wise at how we fail. The first thing that we do is try to understand why. Why was there a breakdown or failure to meet expectations? And we look in a couple of key areas: One, did they really fully understand what was being asked of them? Were we clear in setting the standard or guiding or framing the question well. I would say in our world, 8 times out of 10, that’s where the breakdown was. They weren’t set up for success based on what was being expected of them, either at a client level or a staffing level or a project level. And then secondarily, we look to see did they have what it takes to execute this well? Do they have enough time or enough resources or do they have the right software and budget to get it done? And if not, why not? Why was that misaligned? So I would say that the vast majority of failures fall in those two buckets. But in the sense that they did fully understand the goals and where they were headed and they were fully equipped to do it well, we have to take a deeper look to see why. Why did that still fail? Was there something going on outside of work? Was there a personal or kind of professional challenge there? So I would say that the majority of the time that all of us break down, and I have to admit that I’m in this bucket. I’m often having to stand in front of my team and let them know how I let them down. But it’s more often than not something we can fix, that we can learn from and we can grow, and in those instances we ask them to teach the rest of us what they learned. You’re always going to learn by mistakes and failures. It can either be your own or you can learn from the people around you. So if we’re all sharing our failures, we’re all getting better as a team. But over the long term if it really becomes a failure within a job role or an instance becomes a pattern or a pattern becomes a problem, we’ll sit down and take a look. If it’s somebody who’s a really good cultural fit for our team, odds are we probably just have them in the wrong role, that their particular strengths aren’t aligning to what their job duty is asking for. So can we cross train or find a new home for them? Or maybe we’re just not a good fit for them as an agency. Because we do take such a completely different approach to the way that we work with each other and our clients, we have had experiences, if you come from a large traditional agency, that you’re just a fish out of water here and not enjoy it. So those things do happen and we just try to be compassionate and candid and help them find a new opportunity.

Paul Kortman: How do you actually provide success to your clients?

Chris Denny: I don’t think this too much of a hassle. It’s probably my favorite part of my job. I think it comes down to how you start with a client. As you’re setting out, really asking the bigger and the bolder questions and taking the time not just to understand the parameters of a specific project, but understand where that project fits within their organizational goals or business model, if you really understand how a client works and what they’re facing and where they’re going, you can dream and think a lot bigger. Thinking of a digital project we worked on last year, where at the surface the goal was really kind of marketing focused. How do we build a front-end web development experience that will support our sales teams and customer acquisition? So it was really a brand storytelling product promotion and conversion project. But in diving in and understanding where they worked, we found that one of their biggest struggles is, as they scale, customer service is hitting bandwidth limits and it’s having an impact on cost and effectiveness. So we were able to rethink the way that they do customer support digitally, in terms of FAQ, self-service of guidance, walkthroughs, as well as chat and queuing. So we were actually able to increase their customer service output while decreasing their impact on staffing and cost. And while that wasn’t necessarily part of the project, but because we’ve built a relationship not just with the marketing team but with the full leadership team at the organization, and we really understood how they define success and where they’re headed, we can think in our craft, but a little bit bigger than our project and really deliver on that.

Paul Kortman: What makes The Engine is Red different from your competitors?

Chris Denny: I would say that the biggest thing that makes us different is how we collaborate with our clients. We feel that the best work comes from a place of trust and true collaboration, and we found that a lot of traditional agency practices really go against that. So we focus on a collaboration that is transparent and inclusive. So we’ve torn down a lot of things that used to be there. We’re not an agency that’s going to go from a brief and then disappear for two or three weeks and then come back with the big Don Draper pitch that probably doesn’t actually meet project goals and didn’t consider a lot of other things. We’re more like an agency that’s working side-by-side, showing work while it’s still early and vulnerable and sitting at the same side of the table as our clients and really pushing that forward. We also really focus on a collaboration that is as lean and intuitive as possible. So we don’t have overly restrictive scopes of work, where you sit down with a brand or a marketer and try to guess exactly how many pages of websites going to be six months before you start building it and then fight over paperwork. I have to admit that I’m in a place in my career where I don’t really want to argue with an adult about what counts as a round of revisions ever again. We just did away with that. We’re all here to solve the same problem. We’re all here to get it done side-by-side. So how do we strip away retainers and timesheets and scopes of work and back-and-forth and bad Gantt charts and false status reports and just make a process that’s still accountable and predictable and scheduled, but it’s really lean and doesn’t spend a lot of time and effort playing volleyball with work or arguing over contracts. And then lastly, I’ve just never been in a great creative process where we didn’t learn something new or get a new requirement or something changed. In the old world, in order for an agency to maintain their profitability, they have to really resist those outside variables and changes. New ideas are dangerous because they blow up the project, or what we used to call scope creep. Scope creep usually is good ideas that you just didn’t think of when you wrote the scope. So we wanted to say, how is there a way for us to let that learning and that flexibility be a part of the creative process, something that we embrace and problem solve together, as opposed to something that we’re always fighting over.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use The Engine is Red over a smaller agency?

Chris Denny: I think it depends on what you’re looking for. So if your goals and where you’re headed are that focused, then I think a small team can be really great. But we find that a lot of our clients’ goals are a little bit broader, they’re focusing on growth, expansion, revenue, scalability. And I think having access to a more multi-disciplinary team where you can have one partner who’s taking the time to deeply understand who you are and support across brand campaign, sales support and outreach as well as digital, it can be a more effective and often more efficient experience.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use The Engine is Red versus a bigger agency like Ogilvy?

Chris Denny: I love our brother and I think that Ogilvy is a great shop and there’s actually a lot of great shops out there. But I think it depends who you are and what you’ve got you. For some organizations having that name and having that kind of sex appeal is really important. And there’s a lot of shops doing really great work out there. But I think if you were to go with us over one of those iconic names, it’s probably because you’re looking for something different. Either from a work perspective you’re looking for something bolder and new, or from a collaboration perspective, you’re just really sick of working against your agency. You’re sick of opaque billing practices and getting pitched one team and staffed another. You’re getting sick of know death by a thousand cuts of bleeding change orders and being told that your timelines don’t make sense. And I think if you’re fed up with the traditional agency model, even if you love the team you’re working with, we’re probably a really good set nice.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer a service, price or package that no one else is offering?

Chris Denny: I would say probably not. Great design is great design. I would say that it’s how we offer it that might be different. So not only don’t we have any retainers or anything like that, we actually don’t obligate any of our clients to work with us. So we’ll have to create a roadmap for a project for a year or for three years and we’ll help guide you through what that would be, but we only want you here if you want to be here, so we have no contracts. We have nice terms and agreements that our lawyers make us do for payment terms and intellectual property. But there’s no paperwork commitment from our clients . Use us because you want to use us, and be here because together we can create something great. Don’t come up with $50000 worth of work for us to do this month just because you signed a year-long retainer.

Paul Kortman: And the Elevator pitch, you have 30 seconds, you’ve identified me as an ideal client, now convince me… and go.

Chris Denny: I would say that if you’re an ideal kind of ours, I think at this point you’ve got to know what we’re capable of and where our talent lies and we’re the team and the transparency and the leadership to create really awesome things together.

Paul Kortman: What do you personally do for fun?

Chris Denny: So my background actually is as a creative, I came up as a designer. They don’t really let me do that anymore because they’re all far better at it than I am, but as an agency lead I spend a lot of my time working in leadership and strategy and growth. I still kind of crave that creative output. So a lot of things that I do for fun center around that. So lately for the last few years, my passion has been food and learning different culinary techniques and cultures and I get to travel quite a bit for that. And then the other half of the fun is, my wife and I have two awesome kids and we get to go on these amazing adventures together and have a lot of fun. We take our kids traveling a lot and spend most of our summers in a different city and learning a different culture. So I spent a lot of time with my family and I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.

Paul Kortman: What does your staff or agency do for fun?

Chris Denny: We’re all pretty different. And I think that’s one of the things that makes it’s fun to be here. We have some folks who just passionately love music and they’re spending their nights and weekends in underground shows. We also have some really avid cyclists here, who are hardcore mountain bikers, and being here in California that tends to be great. Our lead account director loves art and loves to sail. So she’s out in the bay on the weekends or at a gallery opening. Our Minneapolis team loves to travel and to go to his cabin and all these different things. So everybody has their own thing that they really love to do. And it’s exciting to see them kind of let their freak flag fly and find their own weird thing to dive into.

Paul Kortman: Do you guys ever do group fun things?

Chris Denny: Yeah, we definitely do. I think that really caring for and knowing the people that you work with, both on your project team as well as on the client side is really key. Just yesterday we had a huge Friendsgiving here in the studio and everybody kind of cooked for each other and break bread and laugh and tell funny family stories of awful cranberry sauces. But we do lots of other things throughout the year. Sometimes it’s really casual and just a team celebrating a project launch with a happy hour going out. Since we do have so many remote folks we tend to, at least once or twice a year, all fly to the same city and hang out. We’ve done everything from ice fishing to laser tag to chartering a boat through the bay here. I think that having that time to get to know each other, also to get to know the people around you, your significant other, your friends, your family, is a big part of that trust that breeds the candor of great work.

Chris Denny: The nice thing is, because we don’t have to constantly fight over paperwork, we get to know them on a much deeper level. There’s definitely the fun of hanging out after a trade show or having drinks after a kickoff. And those are great too, I don’t want to minimize that. I love to get to know our clients. But I would say where we really deepen that relationship and a casual relationship becomes a good friendship is when something goes wrong. With a lot of our marketers, we’re a small piece of the world they’re living in, and if something happens like turnover or they lose their boss or all of a sudden there’s a brand new deadline that they don’t know how to handle, when we can be side-by-side with them and figuring that out and not one more thing for them to fight with, not only does it get done, but you kind of build a deeper relationship. It’s common for us to send a bottle of whiskey to a colleague on the client side when they’re having a bad day or help them celebrate a personal win or something that’s going on in their life, just because we’re really building a deeper friendship there.

Paul Kortman: Tell us a story about the most fun you’ve had working for a client or doing your job?

Chris Denny: I’ll start with the client side. So one of our clients is in the energy space and they build utility scale solar projects, and they are phenomenal at what they do. But these projects are huge, we’re talking like a million solar panels in a single site. And our lead there had this suspicion that if we work together, we could find some better ways to manage the project management in the field. But instead of talking about us, we just kind of deployed out into a desert in southern Utah. My head of technology, my lead creative director and I, and we just embedded with their team in this insanely remote Utah town outside Zion and just spend a few days learning how to install solar and getting to know the guys and going out for drinks and getting to meet them. But all of that work didn’t come in a white board or a strategy. We were just kind of boots on the ground, in the middle of a desert, trying to figure out how solar gets built and installed and how we could redefine how they work. Just getting to know, not the marketing folks and not senior leadership, but Michael and the frontline teams who were doing that day-in and day-out was just really fun. We had to wear a hard hat, safety vest the whole day.

Paul Kortman: And did you actually install panels or were you doing the supervisor job?

Chris Denny: We were more kind of observing. They didn’t let us touch too much, but it was really fun to be there side by side.

Chris Denny: Our goals of our agency, we’re an independent shop, so we’re completely self-funded. We have no investors and no holding company. So we get to look at our growth more in terms of the type and quality of work we’re doing, and the profitability and metrics of our team, making sure that we’re financially stable. We don’t have a specific revenue number on a quarterly or annual basis that we have to promise and deliver on. So the goals of my agency of where we’re headed is, over the last year, we’ve been able to produce some really groundbreaking work with some really amazing clients and I think our goal is to reach out and introduce ourselves to some new collaborators and really focus on growing. Not for the sake of money, but I think that this team has the potential to do some really groundbreaking industry-leading work and I’m committed to giving them opportunities to do that. So I think that that path is new and exciting with larger collaborators to bring in.

Paul Kortman: Has your agency been growing over the last 2-3 years?

Chris Denny: It’s been a crazy ride. We actually just joined the Inc. 5000 this year. Growth has been strong and while an individual number or metric really isn’t what drives us, as you do take care of good clients and produce things, those numbers do come. We’ve had double digit growth every year since we were founded. And I anticipate that that will continue, although it’s percentage growth always gets tougher as your larger. It’s easy to double a very small team.

Paul Kortman: What about the last 6 months?

Chris Denny: Isn’t that an ever changing thing in the agency world? Typically our growth has been slow and steady. That hasn’t been the case the last six months. The last six months we’ve seen a significant increase, so we’re definitely reaching new heights, particularly as we round off Q4. Iit will be interesting to see if that happens to be seasonal, or if we’re on a long term growth trend but it’s definitely been significant over the last six months

Paul Kortman: What does your new client pipeline look like? And I’m guessing that you actually generally have a waiting list.

Chris Denny: Yeah that is true. We recognize that timeliness is a big part of our clients’ goals, so we hope to not have clients waiting in the queue too long, but it’s not uncommon for us to have to wait a few weeks before we get started. Luckily we finish work much faster than the traditional agency model, so even if you have to wait a few weeks to get started, you’re still wrapping up much sooner than typical. But the pipeline looks great. I would say that we’re probably looking at some of the most fun and challenging projects in our agency’s history in the next three to six months.

Paul Kortman: So you do have work scheduled out for three to six months ahead?

Chris Denny: We’re pretty much booked through January, although we do have some availability, so there’s some potential clients we’re talking to that have some end-of-year deadlines, so we’ll jump in and get that done. And then, RFP season just wrapped up, so we’re already getting a good glance at what 2018 looks like. But we’re not exclusively picked out. We definitely have some long term projects that are scheduled well into 2018. So hopefully there’s still room for us to take on some great new clients, but we also have a really nice pipeline.

Paul Kortman: How long does it take for a potential client to become a client?

Chris Denny: It totally depends on the client and their culture and where they are. We tend to work with entrepreneurs a lot and work directly with senior leadership. They tend to make decisions very quickly. And we’ll do some consulting and maybe some collaborative workshop sessions where all the teams are getting together, and we can go from shaking hands to starting work in as little as a week or two. On the other hand we work with a lot of Fortune 100 companies who have procurement processes that take time to go through the agency search process and then meet with product teams and leadership and all of that stuff. So we’re really kind of chilling that. We recognize that every company has its own process and we’re pretty fluid with that. So sometimes it’s relatively quick and short. Other times it definitely takes a little bit longer.

Paul Kortman: Tell us some shame, or gossip in your local market.

Chris Denny: I’m probably going to disappoint you on this one. So we live here in Sonoma County and our studio is in a city called Santa Rosa. Four weeks ago, we had the largest and most devastating fire in state history. Sixty-eight hundred people lost their homes. It’s been devastating. It’s just been insane. I’m so proud of how our creative community has come together, literally three days after the fire, all my major competitors were sitting side-by-side around a table, talking about how we can help our community, how we can help make sure every agency keeps its doors open and our staff taken care of. So while typically I have lots of gossip to talk about, either from turnover or shady clients and things like that, I’m just so proud of how the creative community stepped up here to serve our community that I just can’t really go there.

Paul Kortman: So, on that fire, did I hear you right, that almost 7000 people lost their home?

Chris Denny: Yeah. It’s the most devastating fire in California history outside the 1906 earthquake.

Paul Kortman: And it’s only been a couple of weeks?

Chris Denny: We’re on week four.

Paul Kortman: And where do the 7000 people go?

Chris Denny: The sheer scale of this is insane. We were in a chronic housing shortage prior to the fire, and we essentially lost 5% of all residential buildings. There are huge swaths of our town, both commercial and residential that are just gone. But luckily, 95% of our city is thriving and well, and our communities come together. So I know families that are going to be roommates for a few years, that are sharing their houses. Because we are in wine country, we do have a good tourism market. We’re about 400,000 people as a Metro. We do have a little bit of a higher vacation rental and hotel. And luckily the tourism community is opening their doors to a lot of people. There’s a lot of innovative ideas from temporary housing. FEMA’s been phenomenal. Our building and commercial communities have been great. So everybody’s figuring out day by day. But it’s a lot of innovative and compassionate ways of people helping each other out.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest challenges to working with your agency?

Chris Denny: Because we are so transparent in the way that we work, you’re really paying us for our time over the deliverables. So if you happen to be an organization that can make quick decisions, everybody’s pretty involved in things, you can save a lot of costs and move really quickly. On the other hand, if your internal processes are just kind of insane, and it can take weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to get something approved and tons of back-and-forth, we can get pretty expensive there, because we’ll charge you for our time. I would say that most of our clients fall somewhere in the middle. It’s usually not a challenge at all, but there’s been some corporate cultures, particularly if there’s maybe internal strife and issues where people are not coming to consensus amongst each other but are fighting over revisions, that we can become an expensive partner

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest professional mistakes you have personally made?

Chris Denny: I would say that as the agency’s grown, my job and my roles had to change every six months or so. In the beginning when we were just two people, I was the only writer, the only designer, the only account manager, and as it grows in scale, you bring a team in, you have to shift. Over the last three or four years, my roles have really been focused on leadership, and if I look back over those early years of leading such a large team, I made them a lot of mistakes in terms of setting expectations or communicating and taking care of our teams and protecting them from burnout and things like that. I’m kind of stoked and humbled by making progress there and learning. I look back to the early days of leading the team and wish I would have done things a lot better.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest mistakes your agency has been involved in?

Chris Denny: I would say that the mistakes we’ve made over the years is swinging outside of our weight classes. A big piece of who we are is pushing our clients to try new things and emerging technologies. But there have been times where we’ve probably gone too far outside our strengths, where we go to tackle a project where there were challenges on the other side where we really didn’t know. I would say that looking back, like retail environments design and architecture, we attempted a project there which was beyond our capabilities. We ended up having to bring in help and pay for that. Obviously we took care of the client in the end. But I think that we’ll constantly struggle with how do we keep pushing ourselves farther but maybe not going too far and working outside of our strengths.

Paul Kortman: What service do clients buy from you that doesn’t help their bottom line?

Chris Denny: I would say that occasionally over the years, we’ve built some really good relationships with entrepreneurs who sometimes partner with us to create things that are really just designed for delight. Either experiences or creative that are there to bring humor to their team. But it’s not necessarily directly related to their business model. It’s a little bit of a pet or a side project that’s really intended to be weird and fun. And those actually have been a lot of fun and I think that I trust the entrepreneurs budgeting that well across where they’re choosing to invest and it’s not as if it’s coming out of a CMOS budget. But sometimes the work we do is creative for creative’s sake, just to delight the client and to do be their with them.

Nice. Well thanks for being with. Thanks for being here with us this week Chris. It’s been a lot of fun to get to know you to learn more about the engine as read. And where can people learn more about you and maybe about the fire and how they can help the community but also to be in touch with your agency. Yes

You can reach The Engine is Red at theengineisred.com/

You can follow them on social media @theengineisred.

The Engine is Red has launched a wine company to let people support their community by purchasing local wines. You can go to https://sonomarising.org/. All the profits go directly to charity and supporting the recovery effort in the North Bay.

As CEO of Dare & Chief Technology Officer of Inside Ideas Group, Michael oversees and leads the long-term technology vision of the group’s agencies (OLIVER, OLIVER Media, Dare/Dare West, Adjust Your Set & Aylesworth Fleming), and is responsible for the Group’s technical collaboration, industry thought leadership and advanced technology incubations. He also facilitates the technical community within Inside Ideas Group, harnessing the power of our specialist digital agencies Dare and Adjust Your Set.

For the past 18 years he’s worked as a creative technologist and technical director at Hyperlink-Interactive, BBC, Radley Yeldar, U-dox, Creative Partnership and Havas. Before his current role, Michael was the Head of Technology and Innovation at Havas from 2012, where he was responsible for creating the Havas London in-house technology and digital team, including leading both Havas London and Work-Club technology teams.

He’s been honored in Creativepool’s Top 100 influencer 2016, The Drum’s Digerati 2015 and has been a guest speaker at events such as the Cristal Digital Festival.

In his spare time Michael mentors at the School of Arts and Communications 2.0 in London helping up and coming industry candidates and supports local communities in London through the Future First Alumi as a speaker, supporter and advisor.

Show transcript

Paul Kortman: Fill in the missing details from that intro and tell us something about your personal life.

Michael Olaye: Thank you. It’s pretty full. I try to wear many hats. In my day job my specialty is technology over the last fifteen years I’ve been helping run agencies and departments.

Paul Kortman: And with your hands in so many different agencies, I just want to clarify that we’re going to be focusing on Dare West. What is your agency’s top line revenue?

Michael Olaye: I’ll give you a bracket. It’s between 30 and 50 million pounds a year.

Paul Kortman: What’s the typical price to work with you (Median or Average)?

Michael Olaye: We don’t really have one. Unlike most agencies we don’t behave in a way where we think of minimum spent. Obviously everyone likes a good project, but we also look at projects that may change or impact. That may change to the client themselves. So we’ve got some clients who have a great vision and have a roadmap of how to execute that vision and they might not necessarily have the budget to do that right now, but we take those kinds of jobs and we take it on in different ways. Some clients we take it on in good faith, some we do as pro-bono, but recently we do a lot of stuff with startups, where we support them in terms of strategy, maybe sometimes even the technology itself, and business planning, and then in return we take a cut from any acquisitions we help them make or we take shares in the company. So we’ve got different models that we’ve been working with the last two years and how we can help clients run services and always have it to be based on pure revenue or budgets.

Paul Kortman: But if you were to put some sort of bracket or some sort of number there, what is the number that you know that most clients fall into?

Michael Olaye: I’ll give you brackets. So the usually lower side are £30,000 and up. The medium range we tend to work around, which is a lot of project based stuff we do, is between £200,000 & £500,000 for a project. And then the transformational projects which we do quite a bit on the infrastructure-type projects, they tend to be £750,000 upwards.

Paul Kortman: Describe your staff/team, how many do you have? What are their specialties?

Michael Olaye: So in Dare, there are 130 of us, and we’ve got quite a unique structure compared to many of the other agencies I’ve seen. We have the engineers, and in there sits quality assurance and data. We have experience planners which are the second thing which makes us unique. We have the design team and then we have declined services teams. So that’s the typical structure of the agency. Coming back to the experience planning part is we differ a little bit to your traditional technology or digital agency in that our discipline is around strategy planning and the works. They fall on the experience planning, which itself is based around behavioural science. And we have a strong USP in our business which we don’t approach product development or strategy the same way as some agencies would have in the past, so we don’t look at stuff like customer journey or user profiles. We tend to work more on the behavior side of things. So that’s a really one-two mindset. That would be more the user experience side.

Paul Kortman: And those 130, are they all full-time employees, or do you work with contractors?

Michael Olaye: We work with contractors as well, but the 130 are full-time employees. The way we’ve got it set up is, because we’re part of the Inside Ideas Group, which as a specialty, that we help clients build onsite agencies where required, we have certain hubs that are not in the main office, so you’ve got two main offices. The first one is in London and we’ve got one in Bristol which is in the Southwest, about two hours by train from London, and then we go a couple of hubs via client requirements, so onsite agencies. We’ve got one in Nottingham, one in Birmingham, one in Manchester and we’ve got some teams in Amsterdam, some in Melbourne, some in Dubai, a couple in New York, and we’re currently talking about putting one in Canada. So altogether across the hubs, there’s about 130 people. In the London office, there’s currently about 80 people, it’ll probably grow by the end of January to about a hundred, but as of now there’s about 80 people. In the Bristol office there’s about 25. So those are the main two hubs.

Paul Kortman: How many contractors do you work with? How much of your labor costs are contractors?

Michael Olaye: For every nine employees there’s about one contractor.

Paul Kortman: What’s the average salary of your employees?

Michael Olaye: About £45,000 to £60,000 a year.

Paul Kortman: What is your employee’s percent billable time, and what is the target you guys shoot for?

Michael Olaye: So utilization-wise we like to work on the 70/20/10 rule, so 70% of it is big client work, 20 percent of it is client work that could end up being paid, so innovation work 10% there’s no charge. So 80% is what we utilize in terms of billable hours for every employee we have.

Paul Kortman: What average markup do you have per hour?

Michael Olaye: Well, we don’t really charge by the hour. We charge by the day. It varies depending on the requirements. The average is around 40%.

Paul Kortman: How many clients does your agency have?

Michael Olaye: We’ve got two types of clients. We’ve got retainer based clients and we’ve got project clients. The retainer clients we make sure we’ve got about 70% of the business made up of retainer clients, and they range from financial services to telecoms companies. And we also do a few small startups as well. The project based clients are a little bit more simple. We do about three or four a week and they’re usually on the executable side of projects so activation work, CMS work, fixing existing platforms or other agencies. The retained clients we have fairly long term strategic ongoing projects that are usually one to three as long, and we’re in the phase of just executing the next stage.

Paul Kortman: So how many long term retainer clients do you have at a given time?

Michael Olaye: About nine.

Paul Kortman: What verticals or industries are your clients in?

Michael Olaye: Financial services. We’ve had a founding client who was a financial sevices client. We also do a lot of clients in the apparel industry and the insurance industry. We’ve got clients in the automotive industry, clients in the fitness industry, we do a lot of clients in the telecoms industry as well.

Paul Kortman: What services do you offer for your clients?

Michael Olaye: So our proposition is based around digital design engineering and what that basically means is to build digital products. That could mean anything from an application to an installation. I would say we sit more on the marketing side than the app side. We do digital comms sometimes, but our corporate positions around building digital experiences.

Paul Kortman: And what specific service in there does your agency specialize in?

Michael Olaye: Digital strategy, and that’s across social or brand or technology. We do a lot of design work. When we say digital, that spans all the way from web property to offline properties. We do UX & CX as well. We also do technical maintenance and use Google solutions. We’re very heavy on content at the moment, but not content in terms of films, but content as in terms of understanding digital properties and what’s effective, analytics, tracking, that kind of stuff.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good clients?

Michael Olaye: I really believe in that in the digital industry you’re only as good as your last piece of work. Most of the work we do are based on ongoing relationships so we really, truly believe that we are close to our clients, we are more partners than we are agency, and we work a lot of values from the clients. So a lot of the brands we work with, we work across multiple sectors for them. So with some brands we only get invited to do the initial strategy, but then we end up doing the platform build, we end up doing the design rebranding and end up doing the content scoring, we end up doing the analytics and the tracking. And in today’s world its very hard to just build something and walk away.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s ideal client.

Michael Olaye: We like clients that are bold, that want to try new things. Clients who don’t just want to follow the crowd. And we believe that the clients who show their boldness, we to be able to do much more challenging and impactful work for them. So obviously some clients just require business as usual stuff and we’re really good and really happy with those clients. But where we really we use our USP and drive is where clients really want to change the way they see digital and the way they use digital and where they really become more customer-centric. And also employee-centric so we’ve got some clients who are really focusing on the people side of their digital properties and that’s where we really can come into our own.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s worst client.

Michael Olaye: So if you have a client has a challenge and they want to work with us to find a solution for that challenge, we don’t see it as a vendor. If you have a client who has a requirement and they’re not sure if that requirement meets the targets they want, but they want to go through with it any way and you’re not really allowed to question the validity of that request, then we feel as a vendor. So as a vendor you are happy to do whatever the client wants regardless of whether it’s needed. So if we have a brief and we look at the brief and the client has a challenge and we feel the brief doesn’t match the challenge, we as an agency find it respectful enough to flag that the client and we like clients that can take that on board and if they have to go away and re-evaluate the brief, if they have to work with us to evaluate the brief, we like that,as opposed to making something that doesn’t quite work but getting paid for it anyway. That’s a vendor.

Paul Kortman: What’s the worst part of your job? Why?

Michael Olaye: I think the worse part as a CEO is to make sure that the people that work for me are happy. Unhappy people make me unhappy, so I’d say that’s probably the worst thing as a CEO.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good staff?

Michael Olaye: I believe people that understand what Dare stands for do approach Dare and I think when we go out and we look for people, there’s a certain quality we look for in terms of what they stand for, so you know required to get material in how we work. We have a hierarchy in terms of operation because you need that but we don’t really have a hierarchy in terms of how we treat each other. So we like people who understand, not flat structure, but understand no egos, understand collaboration, understand shared values and helping each other and literally understanding that we actually give a crap about the stuff we make and stuff we do. So the people we look for tend to have those values and the agency’s culture we have is very strong and Dare has always had a strong culture. And what we’ve done is define that culture into a very positive environment.

Paul Kortman: How do you staff a project?

Michael Olaye: So it does fall down to how teams are built. So when we are working on a long term project, for example, transformation project for our clients, we concentrate very much on making sure that we have a fixed core oversight lead team. But then we make sure that people in the company have the opportunity to grow and sometimes even change roles. So we’re quite flexible with people who want to actually execute the work. So the way we set up, which is probably different from some agencies, is we have a core lead team that remains constant, but we flex the teams underneath. So if I’ve got a junior designer, I would like her or him to be able to build these concepts across multiple types of projects, whether that’s web, installation, retail, or app. And I will move them around different projects at different times, and that helps the person grow as a character, because they meet different requirements, they see different challenges, and they learn to think outside the box as opposed to just being only your web person or only your social person.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer continued training to your staff? What does that look like?

Michael Olaye: So as part of a group, we have a training program and as part of Dare we also have a training program where I have a £2000 budget that I release at the end of every month, and any one of the staff can dip into that money for training, kits, software, events, whatever it is that helps them personally grow. It’s very well planned, its mainly going to events. I think 25 of us went to a Fit-Tech event last week, and it was quite good. We had people from design, tech, client services, and we all went down after work and we spent two or three hours listening to a founder of a tech startup in the UK, and for me that’s also training because they get to speak to other people, and then we have training where people by themselves can take courses or go coaching, and then we have training courses where we train people, so we have a management training course internally at Dare where we bring in coaches and they spend six months training up-and-coming tech leads or design leads to become heads of department and vice versa for departments to become partners. We do that quiet regularly.

Paul Kortman: What do you do when a team member/staff fails at a project or their job?

Michael Olaye: I personally don’t have a fear of failure if the person’s trying, and previously I mentioned the culture in there. So what I’ve tried to do, and I think it’s working, is we’re not really a finger pointing culture, we try and support. But when a project fails, that’s where I step in. I have to make sure that the client is still serviced in the right way, even if that means we don’t make any profit, because like I mentioned, reputation is ore important than money. So when we have a person who’s trying or failing, that is not a bad thing, we help them. Where we have a person who doesn’t try and things don’t go well, then it can’t really work at this company. This is not the right place for them.

Paul Kortman: How do you actually provide success to your clients?

Michael Olaye: Obviously if it’s a project like a web project or infrastructure project, then the delivery of the project on time and on budget is how you provide success. Very rarely is it always based on that. If you based it on KPIs that show a business change, an organizational change that impacts customer retention acquisition, it’s usually based around that So KPIs that I set with clients for web build project they usually want to acquire more customers or they want to retain them. So it’s up to us to build products that allow them to do that. Some of our clients, especially on the transformation part, they are trying to change the way their organization works with digital. Some of the bigger clients we’ve got, we go on a two-three year journey with them, and we help them upsell digital within the organization and we bring them up to the standard of which they believe digital can help their business thrive.

Paul Kortman: What makes Dare different from your competitors?

Michael Olaye: One is, we believe that our approach to user-centered design, and that means making, thinking, and executing, varies, because we concentrate very much on the end user and not so much on the products, and the other side is the people we have working here have a real passion for what they do, which I think goes a long way to the work that comes out from the agency.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use Dare over a smaller agency?

Michael Olaye: So the expertise within Dare is a long standing one. In terms of rates and money, I don’t think we are that much more expensive than a smaller agency or a bigger agency. I think it’s the quality of work that the agency does that should dictate that. And in terms of actual track history of delivering good work for our clients, we’ve got that in spades. So the confidence delivers the work, the trust that the agency has the best interest of the clients is why most clients will pick us over other agencies.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use Dare versus a larger agency like Ogilvy?

Michael Olaye: I think Ogilvy’s an amazing agency, but they are very different to what we are. And we work with a lot of bigger agents and we’re not really egotistic in the way that we think that we have to own the idea. I think in today’s world, the idea can come from anywhere. If it comes from Dare, that’s great. If it comes from Ogilvy, that’s great. I think when clients really lean on us isn’t really our expertise. We are really good at design engineering, that’s what we specialize in. So if we were working with Ogilvy, where they would want to do the whole thing 360, and I’m sure they can, we can bring a much more ideation-focused delivery, focused on going around digital design engineering and we can work with whatever agency to execute that. We’ve got examples.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer a service, price or package that no one else is offering?

Michael Olaye: Yeah, we have a few. I’ll give you one. We have something called all experience vision, which is a session in which we have, with any business where we can find out where that business can find the most value in digital. It’s a thing we do with mainly part of the clients, but we can also do it with people that work on the ground, and the outcome of that we find allows the clients to have a much more holistic view of what digital can do for them and how to products that are built into digital can work harder for them.

Paul Kortman: And the Elevator pitch, you have 30 seconds, you’ve identified me as an ideal client, now convince me… and go!

Michael Olaye: Well, as you know, we’re there, we’ve been around 17 years, we have stron history in helping our clients providing meaningful impact to both their brands and their customers. We do this through our proposition of experience planning, using behavioural science to find the behaviour within people. From that behaviour we create the best services and grants that make business change.

Paul Kortman: What do you personally do for fun?

Michael Olaye: I’m really into my car and I’m really into capoeira .recently. I actually like to relax on a Sunday watching football, or soccer on your side. And I have a dog that I just spend time with, and I have two kids. I have a daughter who’s 14 and a grown son one to just remind her. I go to cinema or spend time with my daughter playing computer games. It varies.

Paul Kortman: You mentioned your car. What is it?

Michael Olaye: I drive a TVR Tuscan.

Paul Kortman: What does your staff or agency do for fun?

Michael Olaye: We have a great culture. We have 3PF, Three Pub Friday, where we pick a pub in the area every week where we go for an hour and a half to let our hair down. We have First Thursday, where we meet on the first Thursday of every month and we share our trials and tribulations with each other. We have Lemonade, which is an event that started off as a woman-only power thing to help people in the industry and has now become much bigger, it includes up-and-coming people, people who don’t have a chance to work in this industry. We have our own Braco monthly sessions where we open up the agency to Braco developers to come and spend the day here. We have our tech Tuesday when we talk about technology that’s affecting our industry and how we, as Dare, can play in that world. There’s a lot of stuff in terms of culture that we have at Dare.

Michael Olaye: Lemonade, Braco sessions, and First Thursday are open to clients as well. We’ve had a few clients now. We also include agencies that work with our clients. We’ve had sessions where rival agencies come and spend some time in our office to see how we work with our clients.

Paul Kortman: Tell us a story about the most fun you’ve had working for a client or doing your job.

Michael Olaye: I guess this year at Cannes Lions was really good. I got to take four my clients and nine of my team to Cannes Lions. Now, realizing that we are actually a digital agency, Cannes really isn’t our forte. It’s more TV & film. But I think Cannes Lions has had a lot of technology input in the last five years so I took the whole team down to just experience it and some of our clients, and it was amazing. We managed to mix work with knowledge sharing and knowledge gaining and just relaxing. We were there for a week.

Michael Olaye: I personally don’t have many set goals that change every three to six months. What we have done is we have a vision of what we want to be as an agency. We want to be an agency that goes on journeys, no matter what that journey is, with our clients, and the vision we’ve set, how do we constantly evolve, how do we not stagnate? So the challenges are the challenges I set for the agency. How do you push a management team, how do you push me to not stagnate and not just become a money-making machine. So there’s a lot of opportunities in digital, it’s ever evolving, it’s changing. Digital is growing up. I think it’s already grown up. And we’ve got to the point in digital now where it’s not just about building cool stuff or being innovative. It’s a combination of everything. It’s a combination of making impact, whether that’s cultural behaviour, whether that’s business-wise. And I believe where we are at the moment, where just at the beginning of all the other agencies of how we truly harness technology in today’s digital world. That’s where we are going. We’re helping that clients where data, with cognitive, or what is called artificial intelligence. But using data and using human behavior to build better products.

Paul Kortman: Has your agency been growing over the last 2-3 years?

Michael Olaye: At Dare we had a little bit of a dip about two to three years ago because we’ve evolved every five years. We went through a phase where we did a lot more content, digital comms. We’ve evolved again over the past two years to be a lot more technology/design focused and we’ve been growing. Currently I’ve got over 40 open hires within Dare, and they range from analysts all the way down to designers, and I think next year, 2018, is going to be another year of growth for us. We don’t want to grow too fast, anything between 10 and 15 percent growth in terms of personnel would be amazing. And anything between 25 and 35 percent growth in revenue would be good.

Paul Kortman: What does your new client pipeline look like?

Michael Olaye: Very good. We pitched a little bit ore next year, because as you know the world’s changing. Retaining stuff in digital is a lot harder to come by. Most clients who do digital transformation have have already been there and done it, and the ones that haven’t are very smart, now we’re hardly spending money. The CMO of today is a lot more clever than the CMO of maybe 20 years ago in terms of how to use digital, they’re very strong on the marketing side. So it’s about going on a journey that’s a little more long term. But you have to prove yourself at the beginning. So a lot of our clients would go in on projects, quick iterations, fast learning, fast feeling projects, and we’re just adapting as we go. And then once we create stability we can pick up more longer term work.

Paul Kortman: How long does it take for a potential client to become a client?

Michael Olaye: It happens quite quickly. If it’s a pitch that’s been called, it happens within two to three months. If it’s a, referral it can happen in a week. If it’s a meeting or a chat or an event you go to and you bump into someone, it can happen within six months. Usually most clients realize what they want, they just need somebody who can help them execute it well.

Paul Kortman: Tell us some shame, or gossip in your local market?

Michael Olaye: Well, it’s not really gossip, everyone kind of knows this, but we have a big diversity issue happening at the moment. I know it started with ethnic minorities being in the industry or people coming from lower income families, and now I think we’ve got to the oint where it’s gender and age. And I think there’s a few well-known people who’ve said some stuff that’s kind of come back to haunt them. And there’s a few agencies that have hired these people and sort of caught them because won awards or they were famous, so they get to get away with stuff like that. So I’ve think that in the industry over here, the same people talk about the same stuff,and things don’t really happen the way they should. I don’t going to go into any names or anything. Everyone knows everyone else that’s been in situations, and I think where we had gains as an industry, we’re starting to understand that that’s just not acceptable. And I think that as colleagues of each other, we are learning to stand up for the other. So in terms of gossip that’s kind of what I know is happening at the moment. Unfortunately I can’t go into any names.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest challenges to working with your agency?

Michael Olaye: I think Dare’s got very strong legs. It’s one of the original proper digital agencies. It spawned up around the time of the AKQA and the big ones. And I think Dare’s gone through a few iterations in it’s time. And I think what’s happened is, the mojo has changed, depending on the timeframe, and this is a good thing. Dare’s always been an agency that I believe will continue to flex and change in digital, because it is a digital agency. So one of the hardest things is, everybody has an opinion of what Dare is. I go to a lot of events and people, and every time I tell I’m CEO of Dare, they always go, ‘what do they do now’ and so on. So it’s an agency that has a lot of heritage, a lot of culture. It’s got a very strong brand. So with any strong brand, you have opinions of what that brand stands for depending on what time of day you want to talk about. So I think that’s probably one of the hardest things as CEO that I experienced at the start. Everybody had their version of what Dare should be, regardless of whether or not it was profitable or if it was going to bring us to decline. They just had their version of what Dare should be. But I think as we go forward, it’s just a matter of, the people who work at Dare, both old and new, for them to create another era of what Dare stands for in terms of digital.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest professional mistakes you have personally made?

Michael Olaye: Trusting the wrong person is probably the only one I would say. So I like mistakes. Mistakes are good. You grow as a person based on mistakes. No one’s perfect. But I had a situation for quite a long time where a decision I made with a partner backfired really badly. The only positive part is that by making the decision to do what I did, it actually put me where I am today. So not everything was bad. At the time it was shocking. So that’s one thing. So it’s just good to be aware of the people. On the journey it’s always very good that you cover and you stay close to people who are truthful and honest and don’t always say yes and really have the best interests of the agency, not me, but the agency, at heart.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest mistakes your agency has been involved in?

Michael Olaye: I don’t think we’ve really been involved in any mistakes as such. We might have made some wrong strategic moves but like I said earlier, I think that could be applied to many agencies in the past and even some now. We work in an industry that changes really fast. Today’s flavor is tomorrow’s ichor. So it’s just a matter of making sure you learn to explore as an agency, but you also learn to exploit based on your knowledge and your experience. And if you can balance the exploring with the exploit you put yourself in a really good place. If you go to far on either one, you get into trouble.

Paul Kortman: What service do clients buy from you that doesn’t help their bottom line?

Michael Olaye: We are quite strict in how we believe that what we make is the best. Anything we make or do, at the end of the day, reflects back on us. So we have had clients who make requests that we believe are not the right moves. We tend not to want to carry on with that project. The client’s free to take it somewhere else. And for work that we’ve started, if we feel we’ve got to a roadblock, we usually strategically try working it out with the client. If the client still pushes for it to be done, sometimes we will reluctantly do it, but we make it very clear to the client that that’s not the decision that we would take. But usually, I believe not just for Dare but for many agencies, once you go down the road of being treated in that way, it doesn’t usually last very long if you want to be help your client and be an agency that innovates. If you just want to do delivery and you’re happy to shut up and just receive briefs and make a bit of money and cash out in a few years, that’s great. But if you want to build a brand that does good work, if you want to build a culture of people who do good work, you’ve got to stand up for what you truly believe in, regardless of whether it’s the clients.

Michael Olaye is on Twitter @magicTuscan

Dare West’s website is at https://www.darewest.com/

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]]>https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/michael-olaye/feed/0Rob Warner – Invisible PPChttps://connexdigitalmarketing.com/rob-warner/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/rob-warner/#respondTue, 07 Nov 2017 05:56:10 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28503Rob Warner is the founder of Invisible PPC. Invisible PPC works exclusively with agencies to help them grow their business by providing world class PPC fulfillment and related services to allow them to focus on winning, retaining, and upselling clients.

Rob Warner is the founder of Invisible PPC. Invisible PPC works exclusively with agencies to help them grow their business by providing world class PPC fulfillment and related services to allow them to focus on winning, retaining, and upselling clients.

Rob Warner is a numbers man turned marketing geek. Rob walked away from a successful career in business finance to fulfill his ambition to be a professional marketer. He went from learning the fundamentals of Google advertising to now being a member of the Google Partners Executive Council and with a worldwide team managing over $20 billion of advertising spend a year on behalf of the marketing agencies and their clients. Rob started his own agency in 2012, having already acquired a client base with no larger marketing strategy than just word of mouth. With a dislike of selling, the opportunity to white label for a London agency was the foundation on which his agency Invisible PPC was born. Rob currently lives in the UK with his family and when not building his business, you’ll usually find him in a CrossFit gym.

Show transcript

Paul Kortman: So, fill in the missing details from that. Other than cross-fit, what’s your personal life.

Rob Warner: So the missing details at the moment in my life is, well, I generally will be at a CrossFit gym. Don’t let that fool you. I’m not very good. I’m just very determined. I’m in the middle of moving houses right now so I’m doing that thing where I’ve sold a house, and I’m in a rental house while our dream house finishes being built and kind of living out of boxes like a vacation home. It’s kind of not fun.

Paul Kortman: Yeah. Not the ideal vacation then?

Rob Warner: No. It’s not the way I would choose to do things. So if you were to see me outside working right now I’m usually surrounded by cardboard boxes and can’t find anything that I need at any point so it makes life difficult particularly when you’re working as I do, across time zones, and you want to work at home in the evening when everything’s in a box.

Paul Kortman:What is your agency’s top line revenue?

Rob Warner: It’s in the region of $2 million a year.

Paul Kortman: What’s the typical price to work with you (Median or Average)?

Rob Warner: If you look at our customer base, our typical starting point is about $250 a month. So at the bottom end an agency will be spending $250 a month for us for a single small client. At the top end are agencies spending several thousand per client a month because those are big large-budget clients. If you average all that out, because the smaller ones tend to be the most by volume, you’re talking in the region of about $350 a month as an average client fee for us.

Paul Kortman: Describe your staff/team, how many do you have? What are their specialties?

Rob Warner: Currently we have about 25 full time staff. Now we’re 100 percent remote. So we have a house rule here, we have clients all over the world, so we have agency partners that we work with in the U.S., Canada, Australia, UK, and so on. Pretty much in the English-speaking world we have clients. And so what we do is, wherever we have clients then we make sure we have staff in that country so that we can provide a service that feels local to them. So my staff are predominantly AdWords nerds because that’s what we do. We do some Facebook, so we have some Facebook skills in there, but predominantly we are talking about a bunch of people who live, breathe, eat, sleep, and drink pay day to campaigns. Out of the 25 that’s bout 18 of them. The rest essentially are our support functions, like our graphic designers, like myself, and our operational project management people

Paul Kortman: Do you work with contractors?

Rob Warner: We work with a couple of contractors. We don’t use contractors for client work because we like to control the relationship, the level of support and we kind of like to keep people on the payroll of client work, because as far as we’re concerned that buys us a level of control that we can’t get from a contractor. But we do use contractors for example to build our I.T. systems, build our infrastructure and in that respect. So I guess our non-client facing services is where we’re more likely to do the contracting. We’e currently go to on staff.

Paul Kortman:How much of your labor costs are contractors?

Rob Warner: It’s about six or seven percent.

Paul Kortman: What’s the average salary of your employees?

Rob Warner: That’s a really good question actually. It varies. Because of the fact we are fully international, we have people paid in US dollars, Aussie dollars, and British pounds. But if you were to say across the board, you are probably talking about $35-40,000 as an average.

Paul Kortman: What is your employee’s percent billable time?

Rob Warner: For those people who are doing client work, which as I said is about 80 percent of our staff, they will typically be working on client work for about 70 percent of their time is billable. We allow 10 percent for meetings and training. And what we also try and do is build in a 20 percent buffer, so that we know that they’ve got a bit of time if they need it. But also if we see somebody hitting towards 100 percent that’s our signal to get the recruitment started and start getting another person in.

Paul Kortman: That’s opposite the way most people run. I see a lot of agencies want to keep them at 90 percent and if they’re worried about them dropping below, if they go over a hundred, it’s no big deal.

Rob Warner: Yeah I won’t do that because there is so much new stuff, so many changes, you can’t afford to just have your head down and not be training and not be learning. So we spend time to organize training for our team on an ongoing weekly basis, some of which we do internally, some of which we bring people in for, some of which we buy courses or we work with our colleagues directly at Google for it. But it’s no use to our clients if we’re stuck behind the game. We need to be right in the front line, as up to date as we possibly can. So that comes at a cost.

Paul Kortman: What average markup do you have per hour?

Rob Warner: We work on the basis of, if you’re to take it overall, you’re probably looking at about two and a half times total would be the mark up. But that’s because we spend a lot of time on investment in systems to make them as efficient as we can be.

Paul Kortman: How many clients does your agency have?

Rob Warner: On a monthly recurring basis, over 500.

Paul Kortman: Wow. Which makes sense as the price per client was a lot lower than I expected. What verticals or industries are your clients in?

Rob Warner: So being a white label provider is a double edged sword in that respect. We never know on a given day what any one of our agencies is going to go out and sell. So the first thing often we know about a new client coming on is if we get an onboard form coming that goes, today we’ve got a window washer or a plumber or a dentist or something random that we’ve never even thought of. So we get the broadest variety of clients you can possibly imagine. That said, if we drill down to the detail, we have any one-time, predominantly service-based industries, for example home services. Things like roofers, waterproofers, driveways, all of those kind of home services that you would typically see. We then have I guess the professional services, the lawyers, accountants, those kind of guys and then things like health care practitioners those kinds of things in emergency niches. I would say 80 percent of our clients are lead generation based, so it’s local businesses looking to generate leads for their business rather than e-commerce, which is a much smaller part of the work that we do.

Paul Kortman: What services do you offer for your clients?

Rob Warner: We try and provide everything that an agency needs to be able to sell and service pay-per-clicks. So typically Google Adwords and Bing, but increasingly Facebook. And what we will do is we do everything. So let’s say you have a prospect. With that prospect is an existing AdWords advertiser, we’ll order a recount. If they’re not, we’ll provide forecasts of what they can expect. That’s kind of our pre-sell service. We don’t charge for it but we do it because it helps agencies sell. Then when an agency has a client we take that pretty much cradle to grave. So we will do the on board, we’ll do the account build, we’ll set up things like conversion tracking, so we’re tracking the performance. We’ll implement call tracking where we’ll provide the call tracking platform, the call tracking number, and we’ll implement a report in dashboard. In some cases we’ll provide landing pages, if the agent needs us to build one for them, we’ll get those done as well. So from an agency’s perspective, their number one job is to manage that client relationship. Everything else we do. And sometimes we go front of house and we’ll speak to clients with an agency. Other times they prefer us to stay behind. But wherever they need us to sit, that’s what we can do.

Paul Kortman: Do you charge a special set of fees or is it just the ongoing monthly fee?

Rob Warner: Typically, we have a one-off onboarding fee, usually around 75 percent of the monthly fee and then thereafter it’s just a monthly retainer based on the ad budget.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s ideal client.

Rob Warner: So here’s how to be a great agency partner. We see these kind of guys grow and the reason I’m about to tell you what I do is because agencies who meet these criteria typically grow with our services between 60 and 90 percent per annum. So every year they’re growing at that rate because they’ve got good skills. And those things that we look for in a good agency partner is, first, they generally offer more than AdWords. They’re more than just a PPC agency. Not always but usually. They’ve generally got an established business. They’ve probably been trading a couple of years. They’ve got perhaps one or two or three members of staff, sometimes more. Most importantly they have already got even a small number of clients for AdWords so they know what it feels like to handle that client relationship. And they at least have a basic understanding of the language of paid search. If an agency has those things in place, then we can really help them grow their business very quickly. And that’s what an ideal agency looks like. If you then spin that into an ideal client, an ideal client is a client with a strong offer in their local market, either with a good landing page or one that we built for them with good expectations and that’s where the relationship comes back into it. An agency that can communicate expectations well, and they’re generally the agencies I described a moment ago, will set great expectations during sales that will manage the client relationship really well and that client therefore, because they’ve got good expectations and good relationships, will thrive and grow.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s worst client.

Rob Warner: I have to be careful with what I say here just at the risk of offending people, but that said, the worst ones for us are agency partners who believe that by white labeling, they are abdicating all responsibility for the client’s success. It’s no use hiring somebody like us and saying, I’ve got a client. He’s a plumber. Go figure everything out. There needs to be a dialogue there and an understanding. It all starts from that sales process. We find it very difficult to manage with an agency who doesn’t understand the product they’re selling, doesn’t communicate with the client, doesn’t want to communicate with the client and doesn’t want to learn how to get better. We can coach agencies to be better agencies, but we can only coach if they engage with us. And that’s the key thing, somebody who’s willing to engage versus somebody who isn’t.

Rob Warner: So the worst client from our client side, and this is something we try and coach our agencies to avoid, is a client who is desperate. We sometimes get them and they sometimes sneak through though we usually can spot them. But we come across clients who are, more or less, they have a struggling business and they expect AdWords to save their business, and not only save it, they expect it to save them on no money in 10 days. That level of expectation and responsibility is something that we try and avoid because that usually ends up with a bad outcome from everybody. So if a client is in that situation, we urge them to keep the money in the bank and do something else to save the business and not try and think of buying a silver bullet is going to do it all for them because it usually won’t.

Paul Kortman: What’s the worst part of your job? Why?

Rob Warner: I’ve only just figured out I was having an increasing sense of frustration over the last few months and couldn’t figure out what it was and it only clicked with me around three months ago now which is, we’ve now reached a couple of million in revenue. We’re growing relatively quickly. And as a result of that our business now tends to have processes for things. We have projects to get things done. I’m a lousy project manager and I’m a lousy process person. I am a typical entrepreneur. I think very quickly, I act very quickly. And forcing me to do a project, to get something done that I want to do, is proving very painful for me. So my biggest and worst part of my job is having to actually learn and adapt my own behaviors to recognize the fact that it’s no longer a small one-person business. We’ve grown a bit and we have to take that seriously and do things properly. It’s for the best interests of our team and our clients and that kind of drives me crazy.

Paul Kortman: So in short you require your staff to work through processes and projects but you don’t want to do it yourself.

Rob Warner: Yeah, essentially. Our staff are really good because we want to do something so we have a project set up to do it. We want to change a process, we’ve got a process in place for it. You can’t look after several hundred clients without good processes. You can’t just make a change without thinking it through and thinking about the consequences. And there are the things that I struggle with, because I just want to go, here’s a great idea. Let’s do it now. And I’m not allowed to anymore.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good staff?

Rob Warner: Mainly we find staff through referral. We love to find referrals and we recruit fairly regularly. Normally the first question we ask any new recruit is who is the best person you used to work with and are they happy in their role? And so we bring in lots of people who have generally come in through a recommendation of an existing staff member, and that’s our favorite by far. The challenge with that is of course it’s not particularly scalable or predictable. So what we also do is we use job boards and when we use a job board, we will generally pull out a slightly quirky job ad because we’re a remote team, we’re a little bit unusual, we’re a business model that not many people have experienced. And so we put out a quirky Job ad, partly because that will hopefully attract the right kind of personalities, but it also puts off the wrong kind of personalities for us, because working at home and working in an environment can be challenging. Then we put people through a series of tests, and unless somebody passes all those tests, we don’t even generally talk to them. When they’re through all that, then we’ll usually set up a conversation and we’ll move them foRob Warnerard very quickly if we can.

Paul Kortman: How do you staff a project?

Rob Warner: What we tend to do is have teams looking after agencies. So any one agency who partnered with us, because an agency could have 20, 30, 50, 50-plus clients. We have one agency partner who has over a 100 dentists with us for example. So we treat that agency as being a project and we look after them as one regardless of how many individual clients they happen to have with us. We generally work in pairs for most of our agencies. So with each pair there is always a senior person, somebody who is very experienced, been with us a long time. They will do all the strategic work and lead the strategy for the campaign and for the account, and they’ll be working with a junior person who’s being trained up and is generally much newer with us, a junior of experience, and who will be doing some of the turning the handles on the day to day requirements of actually running an Adwords campaign, because there’s lots of things that need doing that are lower experience level tasks, but they still need to be done really well. So those are done by the more junior member of the team and that always means that we’ve got continuity, we’ve got cover and those individuals are learning and growing all the time.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer continued training to your staff? What does that look like?

Rob Warner: We train weekly. Typically what will happen is our account management team will have a once a week training session. It can be run a number of different ways. Itt could be as simple as, we’ve seen that a person has brought out a new training program on Google Adwords. Therefore we buy it. We buy just about everything. But if anybody in your audience sells Google Adwords training products, there’s a pretty good chance where a customer could buy everything we can get our hands on. We’re looking for that ne thing that we might have missed. So sometimes the training is, hey, here’s a program we’ve just bought. Go away and use your leisure and feedback to the next session what you learn from it and we share notes and see what lessons we can take away from it as a group. One of our key aims of all our training is that we learn as a collective because we need to raise everybody’s standards, not just an individuals. Thereafter it could be, we work very very closely with our colleagues at Google. We work directly with California, so we speak to them every single week, and they will come and run sessions for us. So we’ll get them on the webinar and they’ll run a training session for us. Other times it can be something that we’re doing internally, where we’ve just changed our own processes and we’re rolling those out to run an internal training session so it’s really varied, it’s really wide, but it allows us to move foRob Warnerard in a way that the training keeps pace with the business.

Paul Kortman: Do you go to any conferences or send staff to conferences, either to speak or to learn?

Rob Warner: We do. So we speak and learn. Last year for example, I spoke at a traffic and conversion summit in San Diego. We’ll be there again this year, we take a booth out there each year because it’s great for our business. We will go to places like GKIC, I know those guys, we do some work with them and we were at one of their recent events. So we get out and wide. We tend to avoid those events got the word search in the title because they tend to be the more nerdy kind of routine stuff and we tend to be at those events where agencies and business owners are engaging.

Paul Kortman: What do you do when a team member/staff fails at a project or their job?

Rob Warner: Thankfully we’ve never had anybody do anything negligent yet. Despite the fact that we’ve been going for five years now, maybe slightly longer, we’ve never had anybody do anything fundamentally negligent. Where we do have problems, then we hold ourselves accountable for it. The very first thing we do is look to see if the individual did not do what they were supposed to do properly or did we not give them the support and put the checks and balances in place to make sure we could’ve spotted it. We’re looking as much for individual failures as we’re looking for system failures, where a better system or a better process would have caught it earlier or sooner. If it is that an individual’s made a mistake on a client account and that happens from time to time, we’ve had things where we’ve genuinely missed something and a client account suffered as a result. We will work with the individual, work our process and pay for the mistake. So if we’ve let an agency down and our client suffers as a consequence, we pick up the bill for that.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good clients?

Rob Warner: So from our perspective our clients are agencies. And so for us we’ve been very blessed in that we have a relatively good reputation, I hope and I believe, around the marketplace, so agencies tend to find us rather than us going out looking for them. But things like speaking events and traffic conversion are the kind of places we go to find good quality agency partners. We also find them from our relationship with Google, at their events. Next week we’ll be in Google New York. I’m spending three days with the guys over there. So that undoubtedly will come back with new agency partners that we can work with. As for agencies finding their clients, it breaks down into any number of ways. With some of them we help provide them with lead generation tools so we have our own software tools we generated. We’ve built that help with lead generation. Some of our agency partners use those tools. Some of them have their own networking methods. It’s whatever suits their business style best but we can provide them with training tools and support. And as I mentioned we provide them with self-support, so if they need help to close client we can give them that.

Paul Kortman: What makes Invisible PPC different from your competitors?

Rob Warner: You can look at a couple of ways, to be honest Paul. If we look at just a transactional level, first of all. The thing you expect me to say is price, in that we’re relatively cheap and we are. But that’s not what it’s about. We’ve got our fundamental belief which is we do what is right for the client regardless of what it means for us. So we don’t have internal budgets for individual client campaigns and ours. We monitor it, we record it, but we don’t penalize ourselves if we go over budget on something. That’s on us to get the right result for the client. So in that respect when not a typical outsourcing operation. Outsourcing on white labeling often has you know a perception of low quality or being off-short, cheap, and a second rate service. We said that’s not us. We want to be technically the best we can possibly be and be the best communicator we can be. And that meant hiring in-country, so we hire qualified experienced people in-country and we just drilled down on detail and learning. Anybody in our business will tell you that our internal mantra, which I’ve driven home time and time again, is always, do our best, learn some more, do better, and repeat, because that’s how we get better every day. So as far as white label agency goes, we believe we’re the only ones who provide the full range that we do. I don’t know of any other agencies out there taking care of kind of everything on behalf of their agency partners.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use I nvisible PPC over a smaller agency over.

Rob Warner: It’s really interesting actually. And one of the key words there, that makes the difference, is context. And what I mean by that is, if you are a small agency, a lot of supply agencies will add white labeling to their list of services which is really a way of saying I would like a couple more clients and a bit more income. And if you’ve got some I’ll do some work for you. It’s kind of a supplemental thing, not a main income stream for most agencies whereas for us it’s all we do. And so they might build, let’s take a dentist for example. If you white label a small agency, they might have built one or two or three dental campaigns. In our books at any one time we have well over 100 running. So we can tell in half a second whether a dental campaign is built right or not or likely to work and set good outcomes and expectations. Our breadth of experiences is now so wide, that chances are, whatever client you bring to us, we’ve been there, done it and seen how to do it. We’ve been through that. And as a result of that we now know what good looks like. We also know what bad looks like. Very few agencies ever get to that point. One thing we are very blessed with, which has been a sort of addition over the last 12 months, is that Google has this partner network, as you probably well know, and they have badges and partner relationships at different levels. There’s about 40000 partners worldwide. And of those, about 2000 are what they called premier partners, and within that there is a tiny subset, which is less than 1 percent of partners worldwide, who get to work with Google directly at the Mountain View head office in what they call the channel sales team. And from what they tell us, we’re they are only 100 percent white label agency in the world working directly with channel sales at Mountain View. So that gives us a level of support and resource and exposure that most agencies would kill for.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use Invisible PPC versus a larger company like Ogilvy?

Rob Warner: That’s not the kind of people that we work with. Most of our clients are by far the vast majority are small to mid-size agencies so they would never go to a very large agency. So for us it’s not something we ever come across. If somebody needs that level of high corporate, they’re probably better with a high corporate than us.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer a service, price or package that no one else is offering?

Rob Warner: Yeah. Our AdWords services are pretty unique, they’re so comprehensive and so attractively price even if you’re comparing us to, let’s say a Filipino outsourcing shop for example, I’m not thinking of anybody in particular, we’re generally cheaper and offer more comprehensive service with fewer limitations. So comparatively, whichever way we look at what we do it’s generally better value for money than anybody else out there in the market.

Paul Kortman: And the Elevator pitch, you have 30 seconds, you’ve identified me as an ideal client, now convince me… and go!

Rob Warner: Let’s keep this really simple. Our typical agency partners grow their business 60 percent year over year by using our services. If you’d like to grow by 60 percent or more hire us.

Paul Kortman: What do you personally do for fun?

Rob Warner: I like to do two or three things. You’ll usually find me at a Crossfit gym somewhere

Paul Kortman: And you consider that fun?

Rob Warner: In a strange kind of way. It’s fun that hurts. But yeah I love it because the only person I’m competing against is myself. I’m forty four years old at the moment and soon to be 45 and I’m probably fitter and stronger than I’ve been before, and that to me feels like a good thing. So I like that. And to be honest, one of the things that makes it fun for me is, I work with a remote team. So my colleagues are remote. Most of my friends and most of my staff live, in many cases, in a different country, in lots of cases, hundreds of miles away. So my local CrossFit community for me, are my friends, my social life. So they’re a bunch of people I see all the time.

Paul Kortman: Okay, so your social life is a bunch of other meat. That’s kind of scary.

Rob Warner: I think they might be slightly upset if you call them meatheads, but they may hunt you down. So, hey. If I’m not doing that, which clearly you can’t do all the time, I’m just kind of a film nerd. I love going to the cinema, I’m there all the time, or live music. If I can do any of those things any entertainment like that, I love that sort of stuff.

Paul Kortman: What does your staff or agency do for fun?

Rob Warner: It’s really just so difficult. So here’s the sort of things that we do. So every Friday we have a TGIF call, which is an on-camera call for everybody who can make it. And whilst it’s a bit of work we always try make that silly and entertaining as well. I think next weekend we’re playing an online version of Cards Against Humanity, which if you haven’t seen Cards Against Humanity, it’s a quite terrifying, utterly inappropriate card game to play with work colleagues. But that’s what we’re doing next week.

Paul Kortman: How does the human resources department view this?

Rob Warner: Well when this was first suggested to me I kind of thought that sounds great but very very dangerous for us. So what our agreement was, we’re going to do this, if you show up then you consent to being there and you consent to playing and not being offended. If you choose not to show up, that’s absolutely fine. We don’t mind either way. So we’re doing that. What we also do as well is we generally try and get together at least once a year. So 60 percent of my workforce are in the U.S. So I’m over in the U.S. probably seven to eight times a year. And at least one of those we try to have a staff gathering of some sort. In fact we have one in a couple weeks’ time. We’ll go out and do a social event. We’ve done things like Billy Joel gigs, been to Madison Square Gardens and Broadway shows and we’ll generally go out and try to have a nice time as a team. Generally only do it once a year because it’s quite hard to get people even within the US all in the same place at the same time. It generally involves flights and hotels.

Paul Kortman: Yeah and I’m thinking poor for the people in the U.S. I mean it be awesome to visit Australia or get over and see the sights in London.

Rob Warner: Well we actually have some staff flying over to the meeting in London in a few weeks time. We’re having a family celebration and some of my staff are actually coming over for that in a couple weeks time.

Rob Warner: Oh that’s a really good question. That’s a really hard thing for us to do, if you think of our agencies, they’re all over the world so one thing we do is try and send gifts. We’ve never seen anything quite as inappropriate as Cards Against Humanity and we may never go there. But we hang out with our clients. So events like traffic conversion, one of the reasons that we go to them isn’t necessarily to solicit new business, though that’s part of it. It’s to recognize those relationships we already have and we try and take as many people out for food and for drinks. My personal favorite is the Shout Bar in San Diego where the dueling pianos play. If you want to find me having a good time in San Diego, that’s where I’ll be. We try and do those kind of things as often as we can.

Paul Kortman:Tell us a story about the most fun you’ve had working for a client or doing your job?

Rob Warner: I think the most fun we’ve had was when we had a dinner in New York two and a half years ago with one of our really long established smart agency partners. First of all, I asked him to pick a restaurant for us because there’s about 10 of my team and him and his partner and things are social. I said choose somewhere nice but nothing crazy. I ended up with I think a thousand dollar bill from the restaurant just for dinner. So obviously I thanked him profusely for that privilege. Naturally added it onto his next invoice. And then we went to possibly my favorite place in New York, which is the Bathtub Gin Club. Which if you’ve never been there it’s kind of a speakeasy, o you have to go through a hidden door into like a 1930s speakeasy style environment. And we just had an absolute blast of an evening and our clients loved it. We now go masterminding with some of them. I’m going to California in a couple of weeks masterminding with some of them and there was lots of work but there were some good times as well, so we try to engage wherever we possibly can and just have a blast. Why not?

Rob Warner: Well, being a relatively ADHD entrepreneur, the idea of a 10 year goal is something I can’t even comprehend. I would struggle to get to five. So we probably won’t go there. But as far as the immediate short term goes, we typically like to grow 70 to 100 percent a year. That’s what we’ve been doing for the past few years and that remains our goal for this year. But what we’re trying to do and the thing that matters to us most about our growth is that we grow with really good quality. We want to make a difference to the people that we work with. So for us it’s about growing at the right rate for our business, but building the infrastructure of the business so that it’s not just too hard work for everybody all the time, building the good systems, the good processes, so that it’s stable and it can function as a grown-up business, which I guess it is.

Paul Kortman: What have the last 6 months looked like?

Rob Warner: I think at the moment I would say that we’re on a steady growth period. We typically grow 5 percent a month, sometimes slightly more than that, sometimes slightly less than that, but generally the range of 5 percent a month is our growth rate and has been for the last 12 months. We’ve deliberately left it at that rate and allowed that to happen organically. That’s kind of our natural rhythm that happens whether we try to do anything or not. So for us that’s great because we don’t have to work particularly hard to achieve that. While that’s happening, we’re building infrastructure, we’re building processes, we’re building bigger things that allow us to do, for example, turn some page traffic on and really start hitting the accelerator when we’re ready for that, probably in a couple of months time.

Paul Kortman: So you’re going to turn page traffic on for yourself?

Rob Warner: Yeah, we already do a little. But our view is that it’s time to grow seriously. So we’ll be turning on a lot more than we currently do.

Paul Kortman:43: What does your new client pipeline look like?

Rob Warner: Our new client pipeline is really strong. We typically get anything in the region of up to 30 agencies a week approach us to be their PPC fulfillment partner. So for us that’s fabulous, because that’s 30 agencies a week who are finding us without us having to try to make that happen. And at the moment of those, we then see generally of those 30, 80 percent will engage with us and about half of them will be bringing on clients within three months. We try and find ways to not be a one size fits all, so we’re trying to make sure that if you are a small agency getting started, we point you at the right resources for that. Your uptick to getting your first live client and paying those earnings yourself is generally longer than a midsize client, for whom it might be about sales strategy, and we help those guys get over the line. For the bigger guys who are already established kind of client base, it’s about us taking that workload off their plate and getting them moved up, so they can focus on going out and scaling. And so depending on where they are, that’s generally what we do to get up to speed with the right resources at the right time to get them moving.

Paul Kortman: How long does it take for a potential client to become a client?

Rob Warner: It can be as little as days. Often the two reasons people bring us accounts if they’ve already got that client, is number one, they’re struggling to make it work and the clients are upset with them. So that bring it to us to make the problem go away and stop a client shouting at them. Number two, they recognize the fact that they’re growing and they want to scale and they want to offload the work. In both those instances, we’re generally running accounts for them within a week. So within a week we could be up and running. If it’s something where they’re in a sales process, it’s usually longer and it depends on how long their sales cycle is. But again, a sales cycle can be as short as seven days.

Paul Kortman: Tell us some shame or gossip in the market space of PPC or agency marketing.

Rob Warner: So let me give you what I think is the biggest shame. And I apologize, I may go into rant mode. I will try not to. But my biggest frustration, and I see it time and time again, and unfortunately gurus are selling training programs and people are buying them and they’re doing this, and it’s usually a Facebook post that starts like this: Hey guys, I’ve just won a chiropractor as a client. I’ve just signed them up and taken my retainer. Anybody know how to do fulfillment for chiropractors so I can get them some leads? And it’s this kind of fake it till you make it mentality, which we’ve all got to start somewhere and I 100 percent get that we have to learn. But we don’t learn by guessing with other people’s money when we don’t know what we’re doing. And that seems to be not only something that people do, but something that’s being taught as a legitimate strategy. And I personally think you do your learning on your own dollar, not on somebody else’s. That’s not fair. That’s their money. Even if you are working for free, you are still spending their ad budget. That’s still real money that really leaves their bank account. And I could go into a Facebook group now and find you in a marketing group 10 posts that start like that. And it just makes me want to cry.

Paul Kortman: I’ve met people who sometimes reach out to me and say, hey, so what should I do now? That’s a little late buddy.

Rob Warner: Yeah. You kind of sold it. Any answer other than ‘give them their money back and let them hire somebody who does know what they’re doing’ is probably a bad answer as far as I’m concerned.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest challenges to working with your agency?

Rob Warner: Really simple. The thing that we have the biggest challenge with is onboarding a new client. Now it sounds crazy, because we do it several times a day, but onboarding a new client is the hardest thing anybody will do with us for the first time they do it. Simply because we’re going to ask loads of questions that we need to know the answers to to make their client campaign a success. So for those agencies that have done a great sales job, have asked the right questions, have either used our training or their own resources, but have done a good job of selling and getting good quality information from a client, they don’t have a problem. However, many don’t do that, and so onboarding can be a very painful, time consuming process

Paul Kortman: I imagine that the agency has to go back to the ultimate client multiple times to ask follow up questions?

Rob Warner: Yeah, that’s it. And we don’t want that to happen, the agency doesn’t want that to happen, and we try and make it as easy for that not to happen as possible. And unfortunately I think short of turning up to our client sales meeting sometimes and actually handling the meeting and asking the questions ourselves, we do have days where you kind of bang your head against the wall and go, I do not know what more we can do to help our agencies get this right. Please don’t mistake them, some of them are brilliant. Many of them are brilliant. There are a few who have some challenges and some opportunities to improve their client onboarding.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest professional mistakes you have personally made?

Rob Warner: For me it’s this one moment that stands out, which is the moment where I nearly bankrupted my family and made us homeless. As far as it goes that’s kind of a bad moment. I set up a business when I first left finance, I set up a business with a software platform we’re developing. And my wife said one thing before I started, I am happy to support her decision. I appreciate the fact you’re giving up the nice company car and the bonuses and all that. I understand you’ve got to do what you do. Just promise me one thing we won’t lose the house. And I literally had to sit my family down two years later and say, bad news, that thing you said not to do, in about six weeks time it might happen unless I can find a way to turn it round. My bad. Sorry. But we turned it around. And here is a strange thing that happened to me. Up until that point, where I had my wife and two daughters on the sofa having that conversation just as I described it, I was in denial. I refused to admit just how bad things were and it was only to the point where I could not pay anybody anything because I had no money and we were trying to buy groceries and things were not going through. I knew I had to come clean. And from the moment that I had that conversation and gave my self permission to say, you’ve screwed up spectacularly, you need to fix this, everything changed. Within six months, we turned it round and we’re just in the middle of buying our dream house. So it was the starting point of everything that’s good that has happened since.

Paul Kortman: Nice. So you did end up selling their house instead of giving it to the bank?

Rob Warner: Exactly. We sold it because we found a much nicer one now and not because we’ve had to, which is the way I always hope to leave a house.

Paul Kortman: What is the biggest mistake your agency has been involved in?

Rob Warner: In our early days we were a growing agency and we were learning how to do things. And one thing we didn’t do with one particular account was, they wanted a short term budget adjustment and we increased their budget from spending about seven thousand dollars a month at a time when they wanted to increase it to $12000 for a short period over peak season. And so we did. And then we forgot to turn it back down again. And we didn’t have the checks and balances in place at the time to know that we’d forgotten until they were about $3000 to spending that they weren’t expecting, hadn’t budgeted for, and their credit card was going crazy. Not our finest hour. And I put my hand in my pocket and it cost me $3000 to fix it.

Paul Kortman: Well I do have to admit, I have been involved in a much worse PPC over spend of 20 grand. Let’s just say I was not monitoring my staff as well as I thought I was.

Rob Warner: And it’s horrible, it’s just a heart stopping moment when that happens and everything you want the ground to swallow you. But when we took the view that every time an agency gives us a client they’re coming to trust us with their reputation and if we screw up then it’s on us to fix it. And the only thing we could do which didn’t make it acceptable but at least my the pain away was to pay for it. It still sucks but you learn pretty quickly. Every day is a school day, even if you don’t like the lesson.

Paul Kortman: What service or specific aspect of what you do does not help your client’s bottom line?

Rob Warner: Yeah, this happens to us fairly regularly, actually, and despite our best efforts for it not to happen, we fairly regularly take money from our agency partners to do something for their clients which is fundamentally dumb. And it’s not the agency’s fault. It’s a client issue, where the client believes that they need to be number one in AdWords for a particular key word, usually some branded related things, it’s usually guys, it’s usually competition, and it’s usually some kind of ego trip where they feel they need to beat out a local competitor. Even when we have data to prove, time after time, that it is costing them money, there are several occasions where we have to knowingly and deliberately, with their blessing, waste a client’s money to make their ego feel better. It pains us every time. We still have to do it.

Paul Kortman: Where can people go to learn more about you and invisible PPC?

He’s been in the financial services marketing world for over 11 years and is passionate about taking this largely offline market into the digital marketing space. Jonathan recently ditched the commission and recruiting field marketing organization model to become a fee for service marketing agency, and has rapidly become the go-to agency for the top financial advisors looking to market online. Wired Advisor is adept at building up content-based, automation funnels. But the majority of their work is filling local, educational events for advisors with Facebook advertising. Jonathan is also the creator of Anademy: The Anatomy of the Perfect Facebook Ad, a training program teaching his proven strategies for marketing on Facebook.

Show transcript

Paul Kortman: Fill in the missing details from that intro and tell us something about your personal life.

Jonathan Musgrave: I love golfing, backpacking, grilling outside, just spending time with family, and doing things outdoors. If it’s in the sun, I probably love doing.

Paul Kortman: That doesn’t involve snow sports at all?

Jonathan Musgrave: I do a fair amount of snowboarding in the wintertime for sure.

Paul Kortman: What is your agency’s current top line revenue?

Jonathan Musgrave: We’re doing about $60,000 a month, so $700,000 top line for the year.

Paul Kortman: What’s the typical price to work with you (Median or Average)?

Jonathan Musgrave: The average here is probably $3,000 a month. I’ve got people way above and way below that, but that’s right in the middle.

Paul Kortman: Describe your staff/team, how many do you have? What are their specialties?

Jonathan Musgrave: To this point, I’ve been doing everything by myself. About a month ago, I hired a part-time person that’s doing about twenty hours a week on page building, that’s about $25 an hour. I also have a design firm on retainer, they’re probably $2,000 a month. Other than that it’s mostly just me. We’re looking to hire a team of 4 to 6 people here in the next thirty days.

Paul Kortman: So you’re not using any contractors?

Jonathan Musgrave: No. To this point, everything’s just been me. We started out in March of this year and it’s been largely on my shoulders and just getting to that point where we realize we’re not going to be able to grow without a team and really looking to scale up progressively.

Paul Kortman: What’s the average salary you plan to pay those you’re about to hire?

Jonathan Musgrave: We’ve got them penciled in around $65,000. Denver is a really competitive job market right now and my philosophy on this is a little bit different than some people. I prefer to find people with really good character who have an aptitude to learn and really train them the skills they need to be digital marketers as opposed to finding highly experienced people. I think that’s because, to a large degree, all of us are self-taught, even though I’m been marketing for eleven years I’ve only been doing digital for about four years, so have this perspective that if I can learn how to do this, I can teach other people how to do this too. So I’m not necessarily going after that really experienced person, just trying to build a team of people who can grow with us.

Paul Kortman: Are you going to operate on billable time for your employees? What model are you going to use for that?

Jonathan Musgrave: We’re going to do a really competitive benefits package right out of the gate, three weeks paid vacation, healthcare, 401k and everything. You look at these companies that put an emphasis on employee benefits, and my wife works at a fantastic company at Remax, and people just don’t’ leave. They love their jobs & they love the environment, so I think trying to build a team culture here that reflects those attributes that we want to make available to our employees is really important to us.

Paul Kortman: I was going more for how they have to track their time and working on clients’ projects x amount of hours a week, etc. Do you have that broken out?

Jonathan Musgrave: Currently we do that with timesheets for our contractors that we work with because we pay them hourly. But our salaried employees will be onsite, in our office and we won’t make them timesheets.

Paul Kortman: Do you have an idea of what kind of markup you’re doing?

Jonathan Musgrave: Our cost to our clients is mainly a retainer based on what we’re going to do for them. Here are the deliverables, we’re going to give you these three main campaign assets and execute everything for you and of course, we understand on our end how much time it’s going to take to execute. But we’re not time tracking like an attorney would, like we spent three hours on a phone call, we did this or this. Internally, our goal is to keep above 50% margin but I think when you’re in aggressive growth mode like this, there’s just a certain level of expectation. We’re going to have to live in this for a couple of months before we really understand how it’s going to work.

Paul Kortman: How many clients does Wired Advisor currently have?

Jonathan Musgrave: We have about ten of what I call private clients. Those are the guys who pay a retainer and we do whatever those people want us to do for them. We also have really scalable systems built out so our people can engage us for a single campaign rather than having some sort of long term engagement. So our revenues split 50-50 between those two, right now. The thing is that the scalable platforms are so much easier to execute. We spend less time to execute them. But any given month, we’re probably working with about forty different clients, but about twenty of those clients are the same every single month working with us day-in and day-out.

Paul Kortman: So the vertical or industry you’re working is strictly financial advisors?

Jonathan Musgrave: Financial professionals are kind of a broad spectrum of people, and I think it’s as confusing to people in marketing as it is to clients sometimes. I would say the majority of our financial advisor clients have got a dual income source; about half of their revenue is going to come from commission-based products and that could be insurance, mutual funds, and then the other half is coming from assets under management. We have recently started getting a little bit outside of financial services, we do some work with dentists, primarily marketing Invisalign services and we’ll do some one-off stuff for charities and that sort of thing as well. But probably 95% of our revenue right now is coming from financial advisors.

Paul Kortman: What services do you offer for your clients?

Jonathan Musgrave: We’re really heavy on advertising. Probably 80% of my day is spent inside of Facebook, building campaigns, writing copies, executing new campaigns, moderating existing campaigns, just keeping everything running smoothly. The number one way that financial advisors have been marketing for the last fifteen years is doing live local workshops. Some of them do it at dinner, some of them do it in colleges and libraries, but what we’re able to do with digital advertising is replace a really expensive line item for them, which is direct mail, and these guys are spending $7,000 to $10,000 per month on direct mail, and we can reduce that cost substantially. Our average cost per campaign is under $2,000 dollars. The majority of services that we’re doing is promoting events for them. We also build out custom automation funnels for people and we really believe that video is the way to communicate content to our clients online, so we’ve got a pretty robust system that we’re looking to roll out for people who are looking to automate more of their marketing process. But by far, the vast majority is the event promotion.

Paul Kortman: Even on the event promotion you use video for that, correct?

Jonathan Musgrave: We do, here and there, if clients have good video. I don’t want to broad brush the industry, but the majority of financial advisors don’t have really good, high-quality video that we can use, and because we’re virtual and we don’t go on site and shoot video, it’s hard for us to create those assets for them. So the majority of the stuff that we do with event promotion is all with static image Facebook posts and traditional landing pages.

Paul Kortman: Knowing that there’s a lot of regulation in the financial services industry, how do you deal with that when writing Facebook ad copy?

Jonathan Musgrave: Ultimately, the compliance is not on our shoulders, the compliance burden lies on the advisor. Depending on what sort of licensing they have, pretty much everyone is insurance licensed, and the majority of the clients either work with a broker-dealer or with a registered investment advisor that takes the compliance moderating on their shoulders. So our clients are responsible to get everything approved through their registered investment advisor or broker-dealer. In terms of how we make that happen, we leverage the experience that we’ve had in this market for eleven years. I’ve never worked outside of financial service marketing, so I have a really good understanding of what’s going to be proof of compliance and what won’t. We sort a lot of the stuff we talk about. Anytime you make some sort of claim, you have to qualify it. And you can never refer to a client’s testimonial on behalf of your advisor-client. If you have a good framework of how compliance works, it’s not that difficult of a process, but I could see if somebody who was used to doing digital advertising in another field came into finance, it would just be overwhelming for them. So our kind of unfair advantage is, we get a turnaround on compliance within 24 to 48 hours, but really we send things clean through the first time and avoid a lot of those challenges.

Paul Kortman: Nice. Because I see Facebook ads as moving so quickly that you want to get those approvals, but you have to wait that time to actually use them.

Jonathan Musgrave: Yeah, we can’t push play on a campaign until we get the green light from the client. But really what that forces us to do, and this is something that is against my nature, I’m not really a scheduled and organized person, so on the agency’s side, now that I am having to really accommodate people in the process that they have to live by, it’s really forced us to make really rigid timelines for campaign production and stick to those religiously. Aside from getting campaigns launched on time, it’s just been a huge upgrade in quality of life, being able to have a schedule and live by it. There’s a guy named Jocko who is a retired Navy SEAL, and he wrote an awesome book in which he ultimately says that discipline equals freedom. And for entrepreneurs, we sometimes look at ourselves and think being able to do whatever I want equals freedom, but in reality, when we build structures around ourselves, we end up eliminating the decision-making process that sometimes is challenging to us, and we know exactly what to do and when to do it. I’ve tried to adopt that mentality in the last several months with my agency, and specifically with compliance and production schedules, it’s made a huge difference.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s ideal client.

Jonathan Musgrave: My ideal client is going to have to sell a mixture of commission and fee-based products. It’s hard to liquidate an expensive advertising campaign if you don’t have some sort of commission sale on the front-end, and so the majority of y advisors do sell some commission-based products, and that really gives them a budget to pay us for advertising. We also tend to work with the top-of-the-top advisors, our average advisors are probably doing $10 million in new business per year. That’s not their net, that’s ultimately the new assets they’re gathering in any twelve-month period. But what that really does for us as an agency is number one, these guys have money, we’re not having to sell hard for them, and number two, typically people with money are some of the easiest people to work with. If our campaign were to fall flat, which hopefully it doesn’t, and it very frequently does, but if you’re depending on that to pay your bills the next month, there’s a huge stress and strain on your business because of that. People who have a very repeatable and sustainable business process already, they’ve got the money to weather the highs and lows of the business that is a part of marketing. Really, people who have some sort of frontend product sale, it’s going to liquidate their advertising cost and also are probably doing half a million plus in revenue to their office per year. That’s the sweet spot where we can serve the best people.

Paul Kortman: Describe your agency’s worst client.

Jonathan Musgrave: The worst clients are the ones who want to micromanage the entire process. When you spend literally seven figures on Facebook, you start to learn what works and what doesn’t work. And the advisors that are the most challenging to work with are the ones who think that they’re as good marketers as you are. And even if they’ve never used online tools or Facebook advertising before, they think they know what’s going to work. So when we send out proofs and ad copy and landing pages and everything’s ready to go and we need their thumbs-up, that’s a huge challenge to us. Because ultimately, we’re here to make money, but what we really care about, the way we’re going to build a sustainable business is if we deliver results for the client. Sometimes, the worst clients are the ones who get in their own way and cannibalize their own success by trying to change everything, and we do want to customize things and make them exactly that advisor, but at the same time, we have a series of best practices that we’ve proven to work over and over again, so it becomes a nightmare when people want to change that and get outside of what is working. People who are coachable are not only the ones who get the best results but are the best to work with.

Paul Kortman: What’s the worst part of your job? Why?

Jonathan Musgrave: I love marketing. I love clicking buttons. I love the technical side of it. I love the copyrighting and the creative side of it. So there’s not a whole lot about what I actually do that I don’t like. The things that I don’t like are the things that take me away from the marketing aspect. Trying to get billing figured out, a client that’s late on payments, chasing people to get their checks or credit cards paid, busy work like tracking timesheets for some of our vendors, some of that offline communication stuff. But I really love the marketing aspect and then all of the parts you need to run a business, technology, phones, printers, those are the things that bog me down and I hate doing them.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good staff?

Jonathan Musgrave: I’ve done a couple of things in line with the other question you asked, what things I hate doing. One of the things I hate is posting jobs, writing job descriptions, doing interviews. I love people and I love helping people and it’s hard for me to do an interview with anybody that I like, even if they’re not qualified, and say you’re probably not a good fit. So I’ve chosen to outsource all of that. I’ve got an HR firm that’s doing all of the job advertising, helping me write good descriptions, they’re talking to everybody before they even get my name, and then only the people who meet the initial qualifications and go through a phone interview are going to get a real interview with me. So that’s been my approach: Find people who are good at doing that and let them do it. It’s going to cost a little bit of money but the quality people we get out of it will be better and I won’t have to deal with all of that frustration.

Paul Kortman: What kinds of things have you put as requirements for your staff?

Jonathan Musgrave: I think that so much of what we do is advertisers, so there aren’t too many hard skills that we have to have. Of course, if you’re building websites, we don’t do entire website production, you need people with hard skills that can do development and code. What we do is we sue a lot of SAS products and integration, things that can be easily learned. So the requirements are good computer skills and a lot of the younger generation are super adept at figuring out how things work and you don’t have to explain things to them. Even with the vendors that we’re working with right now and our freelance staff, we found that after about seven days these guys are doing work that’s actually helping us. And of course that learning curve is going to continue for twelve months but I think that our return on investment with employees and marketing can be so much more active if you find people who are just adaptable and quick to learn. We want people who have experience with comparable tools and we may use Unbounce to build our pages but if somebody has experience with Instapage or Leadpages or Clickfunnels, we know these people understand the basics of how to build a page and we can train them on a different platform. And of course, we’re also hiring a project manager. That’s one of those things where we are going after experience, we want somebody who can handle a high volume of work and has really good quality assurance and who is a process-driven person. So that might be a little bit outside the box, where we’re looking for someone who can teach us a little bit about project management.

Paul Kortman: How do you plan on staffing a project?

Jonathan Musgrave: The project manager will be involved in every project, we’ll have three ‘taskrabbits’ that are really taking the campaign from order to completion. They won’t be client facing at all, they’ll be strictly internal, and then that person will be wholly responsible for a single project. We won’t have multiple people aside from the one taskrabbit and one project manager involved in multiple different sets of different people’s process. So we really want one guy to be able to focus and take that end to end, and then have the project manager come in as the quarterback and keep everybody on schedule.

Paul Kortman: Will you offer continued training to your staff? What will that look like?

Jonathan Musgrave: The biggest thing we’re looking to do is become a certified partner with Digital Marketer. I think they’re probably the leader out there in continued education and they’ve got their labs program and their HQ program. So we’re going to plug into that and make sure everybody is doing that training and using it to its full extent. I know other agency owners who have had great success with that process and I think that’s step one. I want to be really connected with Digital Marketer in that respect and then the biggest thing I’ve done for myself that has leveled up my skillset is going to events. I think that as we grow, that’s something that our key team members will be more involved in.

Paul Kortman: How do you find good clients?

Jonathan Musgrave: I think two things: It’s silly if you run Facebook ads for your business and you’re asking somebody how to get clients. If you’re advertising for them on Facebook, then wouldn’t you advertise for yourself on Facebook? To me, that’s an oxymoron, and I think that if only to prove you can do what you say you’re going to do, that has to be the starting point. Maybe this is a little bit hypocritical of me, but the majority of my clients come from referrals. Having been in business for so long, I’ve made really good relationships through distribution partners and 100% of our business to this point has been referral based. I think that’s one of the benefits of tackling this specific niche, and that is, when you become known as the ‘the agency’ in your specific field, you eliminate a lot of the competition. You can own that market. You really don’t have to market so hard when you can closely identify who your target client is. That would be an admonition that I would give to people looking to scale: if you can really serve a specific market, you won’t have to work that hard to find clients because you’ve gotten so integrated into this niche that people will come to you. Then when you do have to sell, and there’s always a moment of sale involved, even with a referral, but when you’re coming from a position of authority and experience in that specific market, there’s really no competition between you and another agency that’s more of a generalist.

Paul Kortman: What makes Wired Advisor different from your competitors?

Jonathan Musgrave: Really, financial services is an offline marketing world. So the competitors that we typically talk about are people who do the exact same thing like us for the exact same clients. In our market, it’s really not like that yet, and it’s going to get to that point. But really our competitors, for the most part, are people who are sending out direct mail for their lead generation efforts, and we have such a compelling advantage over offline marketing, that it’s very simple to prove value o people and show them why we’re a better solution. When I learned digital advertising in the financial services world, there was nobody out there to copy, there was nobody doing it. So everything we learned, we learned from the ground up. Now there are other people doing digital advertising for the same sort of clients, but we’re so far ahead of them because we got this experience, we’ve got this background inside the business. The differentiator we have is that we’re not offline and we can show you maybe for the first time how to advertise online and attract clients through digital advertising.

Paul Kortman: Why should I use Wired Advisor over a smaller agency?

Jonathan Musgrave: I think there are two things to think about: One, are you talking to an agency that’s doing this in financial services? If the answer is no, then there’s no question that you won’t work with us. I have a lot of people reach out and ask, how this works. It’s a tough nut to crack, and we’re trying to sell something that’s unsexy to people who are oversaturated with advertising and aren’t very motivated to make a decision today. It’s a tough market and you have to understand what your client is experiencing. Honestly, if you have a guy who’s a really successful Facebook advertiser and he sells info products or does e-commerce or any number of different things, and then you take that same person and put him into financial services, I think more often than not that guy’s not going to have a lot of success. Really, the reason people should work with us is because we’ve got a track record and 95% of our business is repeat customers. So I think that’s the bottom line, there’s no end to the amount of money someone will spend with you if they’re confident that you’ll deliver results. That’s what we talk about in the sales process, here are the results for other people in your exact same situation, and that makes it easy to sell. We don’t have a lot of competition to start with and when we do, our track record is the thing that really closes the deal.

Paul Kortman: Do you offer a service, price or package that no one else is offering?

Jonathan Musgrave: We do, and I think that this is one of the things that has really gotten us off to a hot start. The few people out there who are doing digital advertising for financial advisors are only running what I call white-label campaigns, and because financial advisors, for the most part, are not very tech-adept, they don’t have existing Facebook ad accounts and landing page building tools, they don’t have an infrastructure for digital advertising. It makes it really hard to onboard these clients because we have to create everything from the ground up. So what some of the agencies are doing, they’re white-labeling everything and picking some generic brand and then they’re doing all the advertising for all the clients from this one generic brand. So we’ve done initially, we really want to focus on custom services to high-value clients. We’re going to go through a headache with you, we’re going to go onboard, we’re going to build all these tools for you. It’s going to be expensive software proposal, it’s going to be a lengthy build schedule, but all the advertising we do for you is going to be customized. That’s been a huge difference because, in addition to the results we’re getting from people directly through our campaigns, we’re also building top awareness with these guys in their communities because we’re advertising on behalf of their Facebook page all the time. That’s one of those things that makes us unique, and people who have done work with generic agencies come to us and say they don’t want that anymore. They want to build the collateral that’s going to make them successful in the long run, and what that has done for those clients is it’s given us really valuable custom audiences that we can target and if their campaigns run, month one versus month two, it’s not even a comparison. Month two just gets better and better. That customized service we provide is something that almost nobody’s doing in our business that has been a big differentiator for us.

Paul Kortman: And the Elevator pitch, you have 30 seconds, you’ve identified me as an ideal client, now convince me… and go!

Jonathan Musgrave: The majority of our advisors are used to doing offline marketing with direct mail. So one of the biggest competitive advantages we have is price. You’re going to end up spending less than 50% with Wired Advisor and you’re going to get better results with us. Another thing that digital advertising does that you can not achieve with offline marketing, is that you can tell exactly how people are responding to your advertising. It’s like being able to tell who opens the mail versus who throws it away, and then being able to retarget those people who are interested but didn’t take action. So lower cost, better results and the long term benefits of being able to do this over and over to a more refined audience.

Paul Kortman: What do you personally do for fun?

Jonathan Musgrave: I do a lot of things outdoors. I love golfing and I love cycling in the summertime. In wintertime, I do snowboarding and I just started doing some backcountry snowboarding. A little bit of flyfishing, and a lot of eating. I love barbecuing.

Paul Kortman: So you haven’t done the heli-drop backcountry stuff?

Jonathan Musgrave: No. That’s a big revenue goal where we might splurge on that. But one of these days I’d love to go. Here in Colorado, there’s a mountain called Monarch where they take you up to some of those helicopter-accessible areas, so you’re not paying helicopter prices but you get some of that terrain. So we’ll do that one of these days.

Paul Kortman: As you build out your staff or agency, what sort of fun are you planning for them?

Jonathan Musgrave: One of the things is we’ve earmarked all of our credit card rewards for spending on employee entertainment. You kind of have this added benefit, we spent a bunch of money on credit cards, so we’re just going to pour all of that money back into our employees. We’ll do our big holiday type stuff. But really what I want to do is get people with their work companions outside of the office environment. I think even if you’ve known someone for months, you learn so much more about them hanging out at the arcade for an hour than sitting next to them in another cubicle for a couple weeks. So just getting out of the office and doing stuff together.

Jonathan Musgrave: I’m a gift-giver, I love sending people stuff. It’s kind of a lost art, I don’t know when the last time somebody sent you something was, but I think that’s something that is an easy win for us as an agency: to send people nice things. I’ve done everything from sending out local beer and whiskey, gift cards, that kind of thing. I think anytime you have the opportunity you have the opportunity to exceed expectations and do something nice for somebody, the return on investment could be multiple times that. It’s hard to have a lot of fun in a virtual relationship, but just showing people you care about them on a human level, I think gifts are a really easy way to do that.

Paul Kortman: Tell us a story about the most fun you’ve had working for a client or doing your job.

Jonathan Musgrave: I would say that the most fun thing for me, maybe not for clients, is doing something new. So when somebody comes up to me with a crazy idea, those things are awesome because I’d rather do three things that are new that don’t work than one thing a hundred times that works every time. Anytime somebody has these crazy ideas that we can push the boundaries of what we know how to do, that’s really fun to me. I have one client who has a different format for his classes, and he has two nights of classes and the clients have to attend both classes, 3 hours each, 6 hours total, and anytime you’re asking for that level of time commitment from a potential client before they’ve done any business with you or know who you are, that’s a tall order. These guys were really involved with doing this sort of marketing offline and they wanted to bring that online and automate it. So we went through a lot of growing pains trying to figure out how to make those campaigns work. You kind of have some initial success, then you try to do the same thing again and it doesn’t work. But over time, just finding out, here are the things that are going to make this campaign work, and then four months later, this thing is just clipping along. That’s my most fun thing; getting on a weekly strategy call, talking about what’s working and what’s not working, finding out where the water is leaking from the pipe and then putting the right patch on it to fix it. The problem-solving and discovery process is my favorite thing.

Paul Kortman: You sound like a great nerd.

Jonathan Musgrave: Well it was specifically fun with clients. I do have the opportunity to get with clients every once and awhile. I flew out to meet a client a few months ago, I spent some time with him, I met his staff and that sort of stuff is great too. I think trying to take virtual relationships in-person here and there is a good thing to do.

Jonathan Musgrave: Next year, our goal is to do $1.5 million in total revenue and that’s a tall order for a business that’s as new as ours, but we’ve had huge growth this first year, and we’re looking to really build on that next year. Adding the team members that we’re doing right now, I think we have to do that in order to make everything work. At the end of this year, we want to clear half a million, and that’s starting in March of this year so that’s made a complete year, but next year we want to triple that. That’s about as far out as we’re looking right now. I think it’s hard to know what’s going to happen because everything changes so rapidly, not just in financial services but in marketing as a whole. It’s hard being a new business and being in such a high growth industry to project more than twelve months at a time. Those are our short-term goals.

Paul Kortman: What have you done to set up your agency before it started out in March?

Jonathan Musgrave: Really it started out cold-turkey in March. No brand, no LLC, no website. I’ve been able to meet some great people and get some great advice along the way on how to set things up. Everything that we’ve done in terms of setup started in the second quarter of this year.

Paul Kortman: Would you count the networking and all the stuff you’ve done to know people in this industry prior to that? Did you have any idea you were going to start an agency in the financial services sector?
Jonathan Musgrave: No, I didn’t. I have a lot of friends who are in this space, so the second they found out something had happened, there was kind of a frenzy of people coming to find out what was going on. But really this was a decision I made rapidly. I decided, here’s a lot of opportunity for me and I think that I can achieve this best in a new business. I just decided if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right now. I’m a little bit of an impulsive person, I’m not averse to risk, so that was pretty much my decision-making process: I think I can do this, let’s go for it.

Paul Kortman: What does your new client pipeline look like?

Jonathan Musgrave: Most of our current campaigns event campaigns that are finite in length, it’s not going to go on and on. We’ll have a different set of projects a month from now. We’re probably doing forty campaigns a month right now, and I think that will grow to be a hundred before the end of the year.

Paul Kortman: What does your funnel, like taking somebody from an interest to an actual client, what does look that?

Jonathan Musgrave: That’s something that needs work. That’s becoming a thorn in my side right now. We have to do a lot of education in the onboarding process because a lot of our clients aren’t familiar with using digital advertising. So even setting up a Facebook page and putting credit cards on file, and pixels and privacy policies, there’s a ton of steps we have to go through before we can do a single campaign. Really the majority of that right now is being done through consulting. We have done a good job of building resources from people. I have a page on my site called ‘best practices,’ and I tell everyone before we have our first consultation call you need to read through this whole page. It will probably take you twenty minutes to read the whole thing, but I think educating people in the onboarding process is something we need to grow it, but it’s something that we’re starting to take steps in the right direction. That is for sure one of the things that’s slowing us down, having to go through a manual process, sometimes hours at a time with people to get the onboarding stuff figured out.

Paul Kortman: How do you go about convincing them?

Jonathan Musgrave: We run a few ads, like boosting posts to page followers and a little bit of content stuff, but we’ve run into some challenges with branding. In fact, we’re having to rebrand right now because we got into a trademark spiff with somebody. A lot of the assets we would typically use for funnels or emails, we had built them and now we’re pulling them down and rebuilding them with new brands. You know what it’s like starting a new business and all the growing pains you got through. That’s one of the things we’ve struggled with, but the majority of our business comes from referral partners, and those sales calls typically the last thirty to forty minutes and I would say our close rate is 75% of the people we talk to end up doing business with us, and about 90% of our business is repeat customers. That’s one of the great things about the way our system works, that a single marketing campaign isn’t going to be everything somebody needs for the entire year for marketing. It’s going to have to be a residual, ongoing effort together. So once you get somebody in through the door, the value of that client is so much bigger than the first month or second month. It’s being able to build this dependable business cycle with the same clients over and over again. That’s probably something I could learn from you on, how to onboard clients and automate some of that initial work.

Paul Kortman: That’s my fun, when it comes to automating those sorts of processes. How long does it take for a potential client to become a client?

Jonathan Musgrave: We have three guys who signed up last week to become customers, and we have events scheduled in September and October for them. We’re already building them, we won’t actually execute marketing for about three weeks for them, but the turnaround time for our campaigns isn’t that long. Somebody picks a date for a presentation, we need four weeks before that when we receive the order, process it, to actually advertise it. Our turnaround time is pretty quick. The sales process is also not that long because these guys are familiar with doing the same sort of campaigns we’re doing, they’re just used to doing with different tools. The onboarding process takes however long it takes, but from whenever it takes to get an order, we’re ready to push play on that campaign in about ten days.

Paul Kortman: You had hinted you had some branding issues, copyright or trade infringement sort of stuff. Is Wired Advisor the new brand or the one that needs to change.

Jonathan Musgrave: That’s the one that needs to change, unfortunately. We have a name, it’s going to be called Cirque Digital Media.

Paul Kortman: Tell us some shame, or gossip in your local market?

Jonathan Musgrave: The biggest thing that’s happening in our industry right now is that the Obama administration put in a lot of legwork to get a rule passed that is just starting to become effective right now called the Department of Labor fiduciary standard. Ultimately what it’s doing is it’s saying that if you deal with people’s retirement accounts, anything that’s qualified that has future tax implications on it like IRA or 401k, you have to be a fiduciary in order to touch that person’s money. A fiduciary is bound legally to always do what it’s in his client’s best interest. The attack in our industry has been, how can you possibly do what’s in your client’s best interest if product one has and 8% for your commission and product 2 has a 1% one-way fee? So it started to make this huge ripple in the business of how should we charge for our services as advisors and are we doing what’s in our client’s best interests. And even if we are, how do we document and prove that? Everybody loves to hate on it because it’s not actually going to solve any problems, it’s creating enormous amounts of paperwork and legal liability for people, but in the ends, at least for us as marketers, it’s just a giant compliance nightmare that has just caused a bunch of problems. I guess the gossip around that is, if this isn’t really solving problems, who is behind this, why is it becoming such a big deal, and who’s the winner here as a result of the legislation. That’s a little bit of a political discussion, but that’s what we’re talking about.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest challenges to working with your agency?

Jonathan Musgrave: I think one is just trying to get used to the digital environment. If you’re used to running your business offline and then there’s this new idea where you try to do the same stuff online, there’s just so much you don’t know about it. That’s a big challenge, just the education process. I’m paying you a lot to do this, so what are you actually doing? I think the other thing is just an attribute of a growing company, and that is our time is scarce. I took my phone number off my website and I don’t have a way for people to call me. I’ve got some feedback from people who don’t like that. It’s just something that we had to do early on in order to deliver value to the clients who were paying us already without having to spend so much time on the phone with people who aren’t clients. We have ways for our clients to get in touch with us, but that’s one of the biggest pain points, if you call my phone right now, nine times out of ten it will go to voicemail. We have a process where we tell people how to get in touch with us, but one of the biggest challenges is how to communicate. We try to use technology as much as possible; we’re wired into Skype and Slack and our project management system, we can communicate all the different tools, even text messaging, but phone is a last resort for us. That’s a challenge to people who are used to picking up the phone and always having a live person to talk to.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest professional mistakes you have personally made?

Jonathan Musgrave: The biggest thing, the one that has really impacted our revenue the most, is not going to a scalable model quicker. I talked about the benefits of doing custom campaigns, that’s a huge benefit to the advisor. But in terms of what’s bringing in money, the scalable systems we built in a matter of sixty days outpace our private client revenue very rapidly. If I could do things over again, I would pour all my initial effort into scalable systems, and a lot less time and effort into the custom work. I think as we grow people have become familiar with us being the customs guys who will build anything for you. So that’s a challenge that we’re having to deal with now. It’s creating a lot of value for our advisors but at the same time, the stuff that’s paying the bills and making the most money are the scalable systems that are easy to implement. So if I could do it over, I would have poured a lot more of my initial effort into that.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest mistakes your agency has been involved in?

Jonathan Musgrave: You have hiccups with campaigns, you send notification emails to the wrong people or you send a client the wrong email, those sorts of things happen all the time. But as the director, if I’m the quarterback on this team, and I say we didn’t win last week, how did I mess up? I messed up by not hiring people sooner. I think on day one I should have had a team of at least two people supporting me. I think more growth would have massively been impacted by that. I told you I’m not a risk-averse person, but at the same time I’m a little bit conservative when it comes to opening my wallet. I think that hiring a team sooner would have been a very smart thing to do, but I wasn’t willing to do that initially.

Paul Kortman: What service do clients buy from you that doesn’t help their bottom line?

Jonathan Musgrave: It’s two things for us. One is the organic engagement campaigns that we run for clients for Facebook. That’s a news service offer that we have recently added by request, and I think it’s somewhat of a vanity metric for people to say, hey, I’ve got 2,000 people to follow my page! And in all reality, when you go track what you’re getting from that, most people would be challenged to find anything from it. That’s not the case with big brands that are expected to have a big organic media presence. But for a local financial services advisor, do they really care that you post articles three times a week or that you give them recipes of Facebook? The bottom line is most people don’t. The second thing is the traditional website. The majority of valuable conversions that we’re getting online are happening from direct clicks on ads to specifically dedicated landing pages. That doesn’t change the fact that people want really cool looking websites and they are willing to spend a lot of money on it. I almost feel bad because the way that I’ve combated that is I’m only building websites for people who are going to do a $10,000 or $15,000 project. I don’t like doing it and I don’t think there’s a huge ROI on that, at least the way we use them and in our industry. I think you’d be hard-pressed to try to find ROI on really expensive websites. Those are the two things that people buy from us but don’t bring in nearly as much as the more inexpensive things that have an intrinsic value attached to them.

Jason Swenk is an agency adviser and mentor that guides marketing agencies through a proven framework for growing their attention faster.

Fresh out of college, Jason was off to work for Arthur Anderson, one of the biggest consulting firms. He quickly realized that he could never work for anyone other than himself. He decided to change direction, launch a digital agency, and that quickly grew to a multi-million dollar operation, working with brands such as AT&T, Hitachi, and Lotus Cars. After twelve years of rapid growth, the agency was acquired in 2012. Now Jason leads JasonSwenk.com, a unique media company and consultancy helping marketing agencies grow and scale their agencies faster by applying the framework that he used to grow, scale, and eventually sell his agency. Jason has helped over 20,000 agencies in 42 countries meet or exceed their business goals. Jason currently hosts two shows that are available for download: The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast, dedicated to providing tactics and strategies to agency owners and decision makers that cut through the BS, focus exactly on what works and what doesn’t; and his other show, Swenk Today, a daily vlog that documents the entrepreneur journey of building another multi-million dollar business, where he shares the latest strategies and answers some of the most burning questions entrepreneurs have.

Show transcript

Paul Kortman: Fill in the missing details from that intro and tell us something about your personal life.

Jason Swenk: Well, that’s an awful lot. I’m a husband and a father, those are the only missing details. other than the information I put out there, the whole goal of doing everything I do is to provide a resource I wish I had, and that’s really it.

Paul Kortman: So would you consider the business that you’re running right now or are we going to focus on the previous business that you sold?

Jason Swenk: We’ll focus on the previous business, which was an agency. This business is a consultancy.

Paul Kortman: What’s the name of your previous agency?

Jason Swenk: Solar Velocity.

Paul Kortman: What was Solar Velocity’s revenue in the last two years before it was sold?

Jason Swenk: The ending revenue when we sold was $13.1 million.

Paul Kortman: What was the typical price to work with you?

Jason Swenk: We had about forty clients that last year, and I think the average was right around $400,000 revenue a year per client.

Paul Kortman: Describe your staff/team, how many do you have? What are their specialties?

Jason Swenk: We had close to a hundred and twenty towards the exit. It’s always changing, especially when you grow to that number, so we had a number of different practice areas. But we had a lot of C-level suites, chief marketing officer, financial officer, and obviously me, the CEO, and the operating officer. And then we had directors and managers. And we always made up titles as well, just so the damn recruiters couldn’t find our guys. We had mission controllers who were project managers, we had a lot of fun making up titles and screwing with recruiters.

Paul Kortman: So were these one hundred ads twenty all full-time employees?

Jason Swenk: They were all full-time employees. But if I had to do it over again, especially with all the technology and the way that the market has really changed since five years ago, I bet I could build the same thing with about thirty people.

Paul Kortman: WOuld those be contractors or full-time employees?

Jason Swenk: The thirty would be full-time employees, but the rest would be contractors.

Paul Kortman: What was the average salary of your employees?

Jason Swenk: On the low end, it was about $50,000, on the high end it was close to $120,000 to $130,000.

Paul Kortman: Did you track time, and what was your employee’s percent billable time?

Jason Swenk: We always wanted to be over 75%. Most of the time we were about 80%. If it dipped a little bit below and we were highly customizing our infrastructure, like when we were building our own project management tool when we got too big and outgrew all the other ones, obviously,t hat would change a little bit. So as long as it was over 75% we were happy.

Paul Kortman: What average markup did you have per hour?

Jason Swenk: Well, when you start making it to the other levels, yes, you set a baseline and you come up with your fully burdened rate which is taking all your expenses and dividing that by all the amount of time you could actually spend in it. Our fully burdened rate was around $90 an hour. This was not what we charged, but when we would go to a client – let’s say we were doing a website for Lotus Cars. Our pricing structure, what it cost us to do a 20-page microsite for them was around $12,000. But we were charging well over six-figures. We were charging more on value rather than hours.

Paul Kortman: Would you have a metric to be able to track that back to hours to make sure you had a percentage of profitability?

Jason Swenk: There are two ways we would do it. When you’re dealing with monster companies, you always have to lead with pricing that they expect based on their budget. I learned this the hard way. Berkshire-Hathaway called us one year. I didn’t know who they were when they called us. So I went into their meeting, and it was horrible. I pitched a $15,000 website when they were expecting a $300,000 or $400,000 website. Obviously, I lost that deal due to their expectations. They were like, Jason, we liked everything, but obviously, you’re a hundred times lower than everybody else. So when you’re working with big companies like we were, you have to lead with expectations. They don’t care how long it actually takes. So that was the first thing. The other way we would do our pricing to make sure we were always over a 50% profit margin, and the bigger we got the more our profit margin grew. So we would look at the average time it would take to do a project. let’s use a hundred hours. This project is going to take a hundred hours, so let’s market at 25% for profitability.

Paul Kortman: How many clients did Solar Velocity have over the years?

Jason Swenk: Over the 12 years, I never even really counted. We had about 40 a year, toward the end, but in the very beginning years, we had a lot more because we were undercharging so we needed a lot more clients. But when we started getting a lot smarter and maintaining, we had around 40.

Paul Kortman: What verticals or industries were your clients in?

Jason Swenk: A couple. The specialization that we had was more around technology. Our clients were coming to us with sharepoint user experience needs or content managing or e-commerce. They were all across different industries, but then when we really started drilling down, we had a lot of higher education, a lot of automotive companies. We stayed away from a lot of consumer goods, for some reason. They were all across the board, but if I could go back, I would highly tell you, whenever you feel like you hit that ceiling, please specialize into a vertical. It will make all the difference in order to position your agency as ‘the’ choice, rather than ‘a’ choice.

Paul Kortman: Even though you didn’t and successfully had an exit from your agency, you would advise people not to do what you did?

Jason Swenk: Yeah, if you want to do it quicker. it took me 12 years. If you want to do it in 6 years or quicker, specialize into a vertical. it’s all about speed. Everyone will eventually figure it out, but it’s all about how fast and how much crap you want to actually go through.

Paul Kortman: What services did you offer?

Jason Swenk: Well, let me specify this. We did do an awful lot, and I don’t want to confuse some agency owners that are not as big as we were because you can’t have a huge offering. You don’t have specialists. Towards the end, we did everything around digital, social CRM, user interface and creative. We did a lot of development, like app development and custom web development. We did not do a lot of social, outside of managing social media, but we would take and do a lot of business intelligence around social, in order to give our clients better decision making on social when it was just coming out. We did a lot of Adwords and SEO. But when we first started, it was really focused on web design. That’s how I fell into it, by accident. I did a website making fun of one of my friends that looked like Justin Timberlake and NSYNC. So I started a website business, and it just quickly started adapting into SEO and pay-per-click. But as we started building other offerings, I started putting teams together for that, rather than having one person in charge of everything, because you can’t be the master of everything.

Paul Kortman: Who was your agency’s ideal client?

Jason Swenk: Any client that worked with an agency, had a marketing team, a marketing budget, was over a hundred million dollars in revenue, and considered themselves innovators. They wanted to make change. We didn’t go after the clients that said, “It’s always been this way, ” or clients that just didn’t know how to put a value on some of the work that we actually did. If they couldn’t say how much a lead was worth, or how much a visit to their website was worth, and they didn’t know that kind of KPIs, then they were bad clients.

Paul Kortman: Can you describe one of your worst clients?

Jason Swenk: It was a guy with a lot of money. He came to us with an idea, and just assumed that we could read his mind. He never could communicate very well. And that’s a telltale sign. if they can’t communicate well, and they can’t follow your process, run. I have a motto: “There’s no such thing as a bad agency client. There’s only a bad prospect or a bad process.” This one was a bad prospect that we let in, that became a bad client. but they could never get us the information that we needed on time. So I sold the agency in 2012, and we engaged with this client in 2007. They reached out to me in 2014 or 2015, saying they had all the stuff ready for the website. I told them that the ship had sailed, and to go after the public company we sold to.

Paul Kortman: What was the worst part of your job, and why?

Jason Swenk: Toward the end, I got rid of a lot of the stuff I didn’t like. So to preface that, I got to a point of almost wanting to throw in the towel. We’re losing clients, some of our employees are not the right fit, I was dealing with the wrong employees. I was unhappy. My wife was like, dude, you look miserable, you need to change something. Why don’t you go work for someone? So I got to that point, just because I didn’t like anything about the job at that time, or so I thought. I literally started a conversation with NASCAR, and I was going to apply to be the CMO. They had been going through some questions, and the questions were “What do you love doing?”, and “What do you not ever want to do?” When I started answering that question, I thought, I could do this in my own company, I don’t have to go work for someone. So I literally made a list of stuff I never want to do ever again. Part of that was dealing with clients. I think that was one of the worst parts. I like adding color to the relationship, but when clients kept coming to me when little things or stupid things would happen, I couldn’t do it. I’m horrible at customer service. I need to put the right people in place, because I don’t have any patience. I couldn’t deal with people’s stupid questions. So I just made a list, and when I did that, the agency just turned around, and it was fun again. So I would tell everyone to make a ‘no’ list of all the things that you don’t want to do. don’t worry about how to overcome it, that will come over time. But you have to identify it first. You have to look a the problem rather than running away from the problem. Before I applied to that position, I was running away from the problems. I was running away from dealing with clients and that was affecting other things. When I started identifying it, I could actually report it, fix it, and put the right people in place.

Paul Kortman: How did you find good staff?

Jason Swenk: It really started with the core culture and setting the vision. What was the north star of where the agency was going to go? When I made that no-list, I also made a list of everything I want in the future. So when I did that, I knew where the ship was going. Based on my core values, I started communicating that to other people. I only got people that believed in what we believed in. So we credit this great atmosphere and this great culture, and we started communicating that on our website and in everything that we did, and then we started attracting the right people. We got the best place to work in Atlanta for small businesses, and that attracted a lot of amazing talent to us. But the easiest thing that you can do that a lot of agencies are not doing, is to have a careers page. Always be recruiting. A lot of people tell me they can never find the right talent. I ask, are you always recruiting? Do you have a careers page? They say they don’t. If you put ‘we’re hiring’ by your logo like we did, and that goes to your careers page, it tells people you’re hiring but it also tells people you’re growing, so it has a good effect both ways. So at the end of the day, make sure you know where you’re going because people are going to want to join you based on where you’re going. And the culture is all based on your beliefs. So if you can share similar beliefs with the people that you’re hiring and you make decisions that way, you’ll create an amazing team, and then it starts spreading.

Paul Kortman: How would you staff a project?

Jason Swenk: It really goes back to our VP of operations as well as our practice directors. So the practice director led the division, and they would lead that project. They weren’t the project managers, but the practice director would have a couple people on there, depending on the services that we were actually doing for them. So if we were doing a web project with paid placement, they would have the creative director on there and also the paid director or the client acquisition director. And then they would have project managers under them, getting all the work. There was a lot of people, and at that time, I didn’t even worry about how it was getting staffed. I just gave orders to the VP of operations and the practice director, saying we must maintain this profitability and this kind of satisfaction and results for our clients, go figure it out.

Paul Kortman: Did you offer continued training to your staff, and if so, what did that look like?

Jason Swenk: That was part of our core values. We always told them, every 90 days, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. You’re never stagnant. So we want you to go out and find programs, training, or live events. Most of the time we were sending them to conferences and we would tell them, we’ll pay for everything, but when you come back, you have to teach your team what you learned, so the whole team benefits from it.

Paul Kortman: What would it look like when a team member failed at their job?

Jason Swenk: That would always happen, but we wanted to make sure they only failed once and they learned. We celebrated failures because we knew exactly what not to do again. We would just say, you failed at this. What did we learn from it and how do we make the things to prevent this from happening in the future, both for yourself and other team members. So we would document that.

Paul Kortman: How did you find good clients?

Jason Swenk: You have to know who you’re going after. You have to have that niche in order to understand where they’re hanging out. If you want to go after whales you better not go to the lake. You better not be throwing out a minnow when you should be throwing out quail. So it has to start with knowing what that good client actually looks like. Once we know that, then it goes down to three different channels: You have an outbound channel, a strategy of how I can call this person, introduce them, or introduce ourselves and actually help them and position yourself as the trusted advisor. the next part was strategic partnerships. We were the number one partner in the world for Sitefinity, which was a big content managing system back in the day. So they started feeding us amazing accounts. We did the same thing with Microsoft around sharepoint and their CRM tools. So we started leveraging them and making them look good, then they started sending business to us. And then on the last part, we didn’t do that well of a job. With my consultancy, the reason why I put out helpful content all the time, is to help people before they even decide to work with me and having an inbound channel. But the deal about the inbound channel is, you can’t just rely on that. You have to have all three channels because some will go up, some will go down, you never know.

Paul Kortman: What made Solar Velocity different from your competitors?

Jason Swenk: It was probably our communications, our system, and our process. I truly believe that having the right systems is the difference between our agency growing and scaling versus a lot of the competitors that were struggling and being reactive. I’m not talking about technology systems, I’m talking more about having the right foundation. We knew where we were going. We knew who our clients who. We knew how to position our agency and how to position ourselves as the trusted advisor versus always talking about ourselves. We had the right offering, the right prospecting tools, the right sales operations, we knew how to deliver, we knew where we were going, so just putting those systems together was really what separated us from every other agency out there.

Paul Kortman: How soon in the 12 years of making that business did you have those systems in place?

Jason Swenk: Well, they’re always building over time. But I really felt that we really started locking in the eight systems that I truly believe start growing agencies probably at year 9 or 10. That’s when we had exponential growth, where we started going from a couple million to eventually the 13.1 we saw it grow to.

Paul Kortman: Why would someone use Solar Velocity over an agency like Ogilvy?

Jason Swenk: Well, it was always kind of a big joke. The partner will sell the deal, and then the school bus will drop off the children that have no clue. When I worked for Arthur Andersen, I had no idea what to do. They literally sent me to a job at boot camp, and they said, you know how to program, go work on the biggest clients in the world. We didn’t even have bosses. We just had a manager for the project. So it was crazy, and I feel like a lot of those companies are like that. We never hired employees from bigger companies because they’re used to doing one job and having this huge support staff. And their communication is all backward. I don’t know the inner-workings of Ogilvy or any of those, but they were just not on the cutting edge anymore. They weren’t hungry. They reached the top of this mountain, and they were like, we’re at the top of this mountain, but they didn’t realize there were more mountains out there to climb.

Paul Kortman: Why would someone use Solar Velocity over a small agency?

Jason Swenk: We always dealt with this. I think at the end of the day, it really comes down to time. If you’re working for a client, they could eventually figure out what you’re doing. But if they go with you, they’re hoping to save time and get the results that they want. If they’re looking at price as the biggest option, I would always go to the client and say, you certainly can go with a smaller agency that’s going to charge half or one-fourth of what we’re charging. But what do you value more? Do you value money or time? What’s going to happen is, you go to the smaller agency, they’re learning on your own dime. They haven’t done this over and over again. They haven’t asked you the right questions. They don’t have the right systems. So eventually, you’ll hopefully get the same product, but it might take you 10 times longer. So you’re going to put a lot more time into this product or into this engagement. So do you want to spend money and get these results faster? Our closing rate was over 85% when we were chatting with the qualified, right prospect.

Paul Kortman: Did you offer a service or package that no one else was offering at the time?

Jason Swenk: It was around social CRM. So with Lotus Cars, we said, we’re going to use our business intelligence tool and our social CRM tool, and we’re going to import all the social data, all the mentions of everything out there that your audience is talking about. And we’re going to look at what they’re talking about with Lamborghini and Porsche. What we found with Lotus, they started talking about handling. but what we found with all the conversations on Twitter and all the different social media tools back then, was that everybody was associating that to Porsche. And the telltale marketing no-no is if somebody is associating a certain term to a certain brand, if you mention that, they’re going to immediately think of Porsche. If you’ve ever walked into a Microsoft store, they’ve completely ripped off Apple. So when you walk into a Microsoft store, you think of Apple, which is good for Apple but bad for Microsoft. And then, we were one of the first to develop a content management system. I just wished we made it SAS-based, rather than per install. Same thing with a demo marketing tool. Before Constant Contact, we had a software we developed which would send out mass emails. It didn’t have the cool tools and automation like a lot of the cool things did. If only I could go back in time and tweak some thing. Some things I do now too. If you miss by one millimeter, you’re not going to get that golf ball. You’re not going to win that championship. That’s how small a margin from success and not achieving what you want is.

Paul Kortman: So now the Elevator pitch. You have 30 seconds, you’ve identified me as an ideal client, now convince me.

Jason Swenk: Well it all comes down to their problems. Let’s say with Lotus Cars, we would say we’ve done a lot of work in the automotive space, and we understand that you want to help your dealers out and really drive foot traffic. If you want to save time and generate more foot traffic and generate more exposure, we can show you the right systems and solutions in order to do that. We have a proven formula and a proven system to help you with that. It really comes down to leading with what they want and then showing them or telling them that there’s a plan. That’s the difference of how to position your agency.

Paul Kortman: What do you personally do for fun?

Jason Swenk: A lot. When I was running my agency, I use to race cars until I had my second son. We’d go all over the country and race sports cars, and that was so much fun. But now I ride mountain bikes and see how fast I can go over and how fast I can crash. I guess I’m in the woods a lot, so I do rock crawling in my Jeep now. It’s kind of funny how I went from going really fast to really slow.

Paul Kortman: So what type of cars did you race? What series were you in?

Jason Swenk: I raced with NASA in the Vintage series, and also in the Durant series. So I raced a number of different cars, but my primary car was a 1966 Mustang. We modernized it so it could beat a lot of the newer Mustangs, like the Mustang challenge cars and a lot of Porsches and Corvettes. It was a lot of fun. We won the championship one year and became runner-up another year.

Paul Kortman: Have you considered owning other race car teams or do you just want to be behind the wheel?

Jason Swenk: I wanted to be behind the wheel. Whenever I go to watch my buddies now, I have to leave early because I just want to be behind the wheel. Then we raced M3s, Lotuses, Porsches, Corvettes, all kinds of cars. But the ’66 Mustang was the most fun. Then I just got into virtual reality, and I built a racing simulator in my basement for a client of mine that showed me, and it is so realistic. I go back to the track, it has the turn markers, the skid marks where I used to say this is my brake point or my turning point. Everything’s realistic. So now I don’t have to worry about dying, I guess, right?

Paul Kortman: I was going to say, once you had your second son, then the wife said no more racing at high speeds?

Jason Swenk: Dream squasher. That’s what I call my wife.

Paul Kortman: You could still kill yourself rock-climbing though.

Jason Swenk: Yeah, but it’s a little slower death, and at least I got a roll cage.

Paul Kortman: So, back in the day, what would you have your staff or your agency do for fun? Did you have a chief fun officer?

Jason Swenk: I guess that would be me. We had one client that did this lounge chair, and they wanted us to do this photoshoot. So these lounge chairs they shipped from China to us had packing popcorn. So they sent us like eight boxes of this packing popcorn, and it got all over the office. And at the time we had this hallway that didn’t really lead anywhere, so I said, let’s put all the packing popcorn over here and we’ll throw in away one day. then I looked at it and was like, this is an opportunity. So I started doing flips into it. So whenever we would get stressed, we would jump into this packing popcorn. People would lose their jackets or hats for years, and it was so fun. But the thing is, when you jump in, all the static electricity keeps the popcorn on you. So our cleaning crew had to think we were nuts or were messing with us because we looked like the marshmallow man. You would see this packing popcorn all around the office. But then one time, our VP of operations and this car with a sunroof. So we took the packing popcorn and filled this whole car up. What we did for fun were pranks. Another time we rigged the horn to a brake of one of our employee’s cars, so every time he hit the brake the horn would go off. So he would be sitting at the light with this horn going off. I would always be pranking people.

Paul Kortman: That’s one of those things where you wish you had a GoPro to see his reaction, but you couldn’t see it as he was driving home.

Jason Swenk: I’ll tell you another one I just thought of. We had this glass conference room that looked outside the hallway, outside of the other offices. So you know all those fake plants people put in the hallways? One time we got this remote-controlled fart machine, so we would hide it in the plants and we’d wait for two people walking by in opposite directions and then we’d hit it, so each person would think it was the other person dropping bombs. It was the funniest thing.

Paul Kortman: They’d never look in the glass and see you guys busting up?

Jason Swenk: No, they were so embarrassed. They’d think this guy or girl just cropped. That’s the one perverted thing we did.

Paul Kortman: So how did you incorporate fun or pranks into client relationships? Or was that a don’t touch that?

Jason Swenk: We would do that too. It goes back to their personalities. Soe clients wouldn’t come to the office. Some clients would come to our office and they’d jump in the pit too. We’d mess with them, we’d lower their chairs way down so they felt inferior to us, and we’d lock it, so they’d try to make it go up and be like, what’s going on?

Paul Kortman: So what’s the most fun you’ve had working for a client or doing your job.

Jason Swenk: That would be with Lotus. Obviously, I raced cars, and that was a whole brand built upon the racing industry so that was just an amazing brand to work with. We did all their websites for them back in the day until the UK took it back over.

Jason Swenk: Over the last two years we had massive growth. Our whole goal was to grow at least thirty percent, year after year, and just keep growing. But the last couple of years, we went from a couple million to 13.1 in like two years. Part of that growth was through acquiring people and that kind of stuff, so that helped, but we never really had ten-year-goals. When I first started, the agency was like, yeah I want to sell it. Because we started in ’99, the dot com era. All the people were getting bought. Then 9/11 happened, the dot bomb happened, and we were like, hey, we like this, and we started growing because all the big, stupid guys went out of business. We started getting bigger. So I said, I like this, I like what I’m doing, I like the role that I have. I guess we all had a vision of possibly selling it one day, but it was just the right offer at the right time. So we never had a long-term vision. We said, we just want to enjoy what we’re doing, we don’t want to do the stuff that we don’t want to do, and that was really our goal. And we understood if some years we weren’t growing at the rate we wanted, we realized that when you’re climbing a mountain, sometimes you have to go down to get back up. You just can’t grow year after year, sometimes you hit a plateau and you’ll walk that way, but you’ll realize in the long-term strategy, the macro strategy, you’ll actually get back up to the top.

Paul Kortman: How far out were you able to predict your revenue?

Jason Swenk: We were looking more at cash flow. Cash flow is your blood to your agency’s survival. So when I got to that point we were literally two weeks away from not making payroll. So we judged money by looking at our bank account. We didn’t have the right system in place. So when we really started projecting out there was when we were going to run into cash flow issues. So we would look at our accounts, our receivable, our reoccurring, our average, projects that we would bring in, what our expenses were, and any big expenses that were coming up. So we could project out what was our cash flow going to be down to the day. And we could do that to about a year out. Then we could have a lot of time, more time than two weeks, to try and figure out what we needed to do and how to make better decisions. I wish we took more time and looked further out because then I probably could have developed the marketing automation tool. A lot of times you get into your little hole, and you just can’t see through the trees. If I could go back, I would hire an advisor.

Paul Kortman: How do you find new clients?

Jason Swenk: You develop your own hit list. You basically develop the perfect clients that you want. Who are the perfect, ideal clients you would love to work with? Then make a list, then you have to determine the strategy. When you start creating your hit list, don’t let figuring out the strategy affect that. So if you want to work with Pepsi or Coke, don’t worry about how you’re going to do it. Just write it down. Then you’ll start developing the strategy. Going back to the mountain analogy, if you want to climb Mt. Everest, that’s your goal. So you have to determine a strategy based on the goal. So you come up with a number of different strategies for that, and then what you’ll start doing is breaking the strategies down into tactics. So once I determine I want UPS to be a client, what are the strategies? Well, I can do a little bit of research. I can look at what they’re doing. I can look at the opportunities that they have. And then the tactics could be developing a recorded video for them, letting them know of an opportunity they have with a call to action. So that’s how we reached out, as well as having the right strategic partners. Not referral partners, with the typical BS of you give me a lead, I’ll give you a lead. But if you can align yourself with the right technology and the right people that are going after the same clients you want, then you actually complement each other.

Paul Kortman: Tell us some shame, or gossip in your local market.

Jason Swenk: The funny thing is, I don’t know much going around in Atlanta now, because a lot of the time I in my house, or flying out West to where I really like, and my clients are all over the world. So I don’t know much of the gossip, but I can tell you the gossip going around in the agency world. And that is, let’s look at the bigger agencies and model what they’re what doing. And that’s a huge mistake. Here’s why: You look at their crappy-ass website and you’re doing it all wrong. And I know that a lot of people that run the bigger agencies are building and getting their big websites based on the reputation that they already have. But their websites are horrific, and all they talk about is themselves. It’s the same way when you go to a conference, and you have Ogilvy come up to you and say, ‘We are the best agency in the world, we have the best people, we’ve done amazing work, we’ve won all these stupid ADDY Awards and you should give us money.’ I’m like, you’re an idiot, and I’m running away. A good example of what you should be doing is asking questions. When you ask questions, it totally turns the conversation on them and makes them the star in their own story. If you do what I just said, and I’m not beating up anybody, and they’re a great agency, I’m sure. But I can look at their website, and it’s horrible. it just shows a crappy portfolio. You would never know what they were if they didn’t have that big brand. So these little guys are modeling that, and it’s hurting them rather than looking different. So I think the taboo is to stop looking at the big guys, stop looking at your competitors, going ‘they just got a new website, let me do it.’ Worse than that is using the BS excuse of ‘We’re too busy with our clients and we can’t redo our website.’ If you’re too busy, you’re not charging enough, raise your price.

Paul Kortman: What were the biggest challenges to working with Solar Velocity?

Jason Swenk: Getting us the information we needed. If we were doing a website, getting us the content, because they thought we would be the best at it. Or they would be struggling with not following our process. They would make an approval on the comps, we would go and build it, and they would want a major change. And we would be like, no, we’re not moving our process. We’re not going to lose money because of your mistake. They were not really clearly listening to us. That was the biggest struggle with clients working with our agency. We always viewed ourselves in the right, because we created a process. That might e wrong or correct, I don’t know. Looking back, it was extremely profitable for us. If I was the client, I would have been like, you’ve got to give us some leeway. We would say, no, we told you this. We can’t fix stupid. I mean, they were really smart, I’m just joking now. But they were somewhat stupid.

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest professional mistakes you have personally made?

Jason Swenk: Well, it’s hard to think of one, because there’s so many of them. I remember, there was a sales guy I hired. He was really good, he could get into anything. he understood marketing, he could actually help, but something about rubbed me the wrong way and we got rid of him. And this was kind of early on in the career, and I think we laughed about it afterward. I look back at that, and that showed my crappy character. I still cringe when I think about it. We got rid of this poor guy that had a family, who could have been amazing. And I called him back up years later and apologized to him. I kind of laughed to his face, but then after he left I kind of joked around with my managers about it, and that just showed shitty character on my part. That’s probably the one mistake I wish I could go back and change.

Paul Kortman: Did he go on to achieve success?

Jason Swenk: He did. It was good for him. But you just look back at that and regret it. When I started my agency, I was twenty-two. Still no excuse, you’re always learning, but now I just turned thirty, and I look back at some of the stupid stuff I did and think ‘Why did I do that?’

Paul Kortman: What are the biggest mistakes your agency has been involved in?

Jason Swenk: We went through two lawsuits; one went to court. We won the first one and then they appealed and we lost. We always did the right thing. So the lawsuit that we went through was with this one company that signed up with us, but never got us the information and wanted their money back. I said, there’s a cancellation clause. So the deposit you put in there is not yours anymore. Looking back, why would he sign a contract and then not do it and want the money back when things get tough? So maybe that was a mistake. I still don’t look at it as a mistake. They signed a contract; that’s why we sign contracts.

Paul Kortman: How did they win the appeal?

Jason Swenk: Because the judge didn’t care about the cancellation clause. He said, if you didn’t do the work, give the money back.

Paul Kortman: Did you sell any services to clients that didn’t help their bottom line?

Jason Swenk: No.

Paul Kortman: Come on, you must have had some things that the client wanted, even though it was stupid.

Jason Swenk: One of the big differences with us is, sell the client what they actually need, not what they say they want. If what they need is not what we can offer or not do well, we wouldn’t do it. Maybe with the one client I just told you about, with us not doing the work, but that’s because of them not getting us the stuff we needed. But all of our services helped the bottom line. Now, could we measure everything? No. Sometimes I’d pitch a project for twenty-pages and then find out it’s five-thousand and we had to honor that. But I think everything we did helped them with the bottom line.

Paul Kortman: Where can people go to learn more from you and get in touch with you?

Jason Swenk: Just go to swenk.it and you’ll find links to my podcast and to my vlog. If you do want to get weekly insights from me, you can join the newsletter. So Swenk it!

]]>https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/jason-swenk/feed/0Agency Connexion podcast launched!https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/agency-connexion-podcast-launched/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/agency-connexion-podcast-launched/#respondSat, 28 Oct 2017 23:11:42 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28548The agency world is a complex situation that always seems to be about who you know and whom you’ve built a relationship with. However, all agencies struggle with very similar topics. Join us on the Agency Connexion Podcast where we explore the topics that unite and separate each agency.

Show transcript

Welcome to the new Agency Connexion podcast. This is a new podcast with a new format and things that may not have been tried or asked before. I’m excited for you to join me as we explore the future and the current environment around agencies. If you are interested in working for an agency, if you are leadership at an agency, if you are involved in marketing or consulting of any sorts, or if you’re just interested in hiring an agency, you are the right audience here. My name is Paul Kortman, the founder of Digital Marketing Agency. The goal for this podcast will be to interview other leaders, former leaders, owners, founders, or CEOs of other agencies so that we can get the lay of the land, because there is no one way to run an agency. I have been working for an agency or owning an agency for at least 12 years now and my agency, Connex Digital Marketing, was founded in 2010, so we’re seven years old. It’s the fall of 2017 when we’re starting this podcast. At Connex, we do digital marketing, we ran it as a traditional marketing agency for a few years. I say we because my wife is highly involved even though she’s not on the payroll. We’re now equivalent to 13 full-time contractors or employees. Three of those slots are taken up by multiple people so we have 10 full time teammates, and then the equivalent of three extra people.

Now, in this podcast, we’re going to be asking difficult questions, that in the initial planning stages we’ve gotten a lot of people who are potential guests turn us down because of the questions that we’re planning on asking them. We’re not pulling any punches, we are telling our guests what the questions are ahead of time so that they’re prepared for it but we’re not going to make this all nice and rosy and fluffy. We’re going to dig into the dirt and we’re going to get down and dirty. One of my favorites is Money Monday where we actually cover how much they pay their staff, how much markup they have, and are they charging per hour, these sorts of basic things that help you develop your agency and/or look at this agency in a new light. There are lots of big agencies out there, some you may have heard of, some you may not, but what you don’t know is how much they markup per hour. How much are they billing? Are they billing per hour or do they have a different way. I make $40,000 in Midwest Minnesota or whatever working for an agency but if I were to switch agencies would I be making anymore? Or is the average salary you know $40,000 to $60,000? So these are just basic questions that run through everybody’s mind that are ‘taboo’ to talk about. So we are going to run this as a seven day a week podcast. So you will get hit with different topics from the same agency, from the same founder or leadership person for seven days in a row, and then the next person will come in and talk for seven days in a row. So we’re talking five to 10 minute episodes. They go pretty fast and we try to keep it lively and moving. Maybe you’re only interested in Money Mondays, but maybe there are cool things throughout that you might learn from this agency from the founder for the week.

So, what are the topics? Mondays are money. On Tuesday, we’ll be talking about their clients, including their ideal client and their worst client. We’ve had some good stories there already. Wednesday is hump day hassles. What don’t you like about your job, how do you deal with difficult clients, etc. On Thursday we’ll be talking about differentiators. I really want them to give us a pitch, to say why I should work with you and why you’re better than a smaller agency or a bigger agency. And I asked the same question to lots of agency founders and it’s really fun to see the different answers that we get. It’s not just ‘we’re cheaper’ or it’s not just ‘we’re better.’ There’s some really cool differentiators out there. Friday is our fun day, so we talk about what the staff or agency or the person, him or herself, do for fun. On Saturday we focus on growth and their growth strategy and then on Sundays we talk about the taboo things, the gossip, the things that they sell that don’t actually help their clients out. So there’s been some good stories that have come through on Taboo Sundays as well.

This is episode zero. We are launching in November of 2017. We’re happy to have you along here. First on deck is Jason Swenk, And you’ll see all seven of his, we’re going to launch them all at once. And then we’ll start with the next guest after that and put them out there one day at a time. So if you have any questions or if you think you might be a good guest on the podcast, head on over to connexdigitalmarketing.com/podcast, and there you’ll be able to sign up to get an e-mail every time we publish a new episode, and also you’ll be able to fill out the form if you’re interested in being a guest. You can see our interview questions, you can pick a time, and then be a guest on our podcast. We really want this to be for agencies and from agencies. We do know that a lot of people that are and will be listening to us are vetting agencies and looking for other agencies. It’s a problem when you’re an agency in a community and you could service anybody anywhere in the country or in the world, but how do you get in front of those people? So the Agency Connexion podcast is here as another way for you as an agency owner to get the word out about what makes you different and why you’re incredible even if it’s just a great agency to work for or if it’s because you’re super specialized and hyper specific and somebody wants to work for you on that.

So I hope at some point in time, maybe the 30th guest will be me or something like that, but I hope to turn the tables on me and have somebody interview me for seven episodes, and maybe we’ll do a different person each time. But I’d love to tell Connex’s story and how far we’ve come, and I wish seven years ago or even longer than that, I had the Agency Connexion podcast to help me know what I was getting into and how to set it up right. Because there’s no one way to do it, but if you have an inkling and then hearing somebody else I do my business this way or this is what makes us different, that can be a real encouragement for you as you grow your agency, as you develop an agency, or as you know bring in new clients. What makes you different? Why are you special? Is it just your culture? Or is it something really unique about what you bring to the table for your clients?

My name is Paul Kortman. I run Connex Digital Marketing and you are listening to Episode Zero of the Agency Connexion podcast. Stay tuned as Jason Swenk is up next with all seven of his episodes. I’d really love to hear your feedback. I’d love to get your comments and reviews on Stitcher and iTunes. We will be on every podcasting platform we can be, so feel free to write a comment anywhere for us. And then after that, feel free to send me an e-mail with questions or whatever concerns you may have. My email address is paul@connexdigitalmarketing.com.

]]>https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/agency-connexion-podcast-launched/feed/0How To Get Lots of Backlinks Without Getting Penalized By Googlehttps://connexdigitalmarketing.com/get-lots-backlinks-without-getting-penalized/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/get-lots-backlinks-without-getting-penalized/#respondWed, 18 Oct 2017 09:17:15 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28487The post How To Get Lots of Backlinks Without Getting Penalized By Google appeared first on Connex Digital Marketing.
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If you want your website to rank well in searches, you need backlinks. If you don’t know what a backlink is, it’s pretty simple. Any time another website links to a page on your site, that’s backlink.

Google treats backlinks like a popularity contest. The more people link to a page, the more important it is in Google’s eyes and the higher it will show up in search engines.

Pages with lots of backlinks are like the kids on the football team in high school, while pages without them are the awkward kids who stood at the edge during school dances. You don’t want your website to be awkward.

Of course, this raises the question: how do you get backlinks to your site?

If you do a Google search, you’ll come across all sorts of tips and tricks for building backlinks. Honestly, it can be a bit overwhelming at times. It’s hard to know what’s a legit method and which methods can get you in trouble with Google?

Did we mention that? Some methods of getting backlinks are seriously frowned upon by Google. If Google catches you using these methods, they will leap off the corner post and body slam you (professional wrestling reference – sorry). Seriously, they may de-list your site, meaning it won’t show up at all in their searches. No searches equals no traffic…which can kill your business.

If you want to quickly get a lot of backlinks to your site, you need to know both how to do it and what is acceptable in Google’s eyes. If you don’t know how to do it, you may end up wasting time that could be spent watching Nicholas Cage movies on Netflix. If you do it in a shady way, you’ll feel the wrath of Google.

So let us break it down for you. Here are the simplest, most effective ways you can build backlinks, as well as the pros and cons of both.

Buying Backlinks

We’re going to start off with the worst, shadiest methods – the ones that will probably cause Google to kick down your digital door.

If you want a lot of backlinks fast, you can buy them from people. There are several ways people sell backlinks. Some operate a Private Blog Network, which is essentially a bunch of websites owned by the same person. If you purchase links from them, they’ll link back to you on all the websites they own.

For example, if you go on Fiverr and search “backlinks”, you’ll get results like this:

All these sellers are offering you a ton of backlinks for a low price, which should always be a red flag.

You can typically get a lot of backlinks in a short time using this method, but you’re playing with fire.

Google hasn’t become a multi-billion dollar company by being stupid. They know how the game is played and are constantly updating their algorithm to look for shady backlinks. If they catch you purchasing these types of links…nice knowing you, enjoy living in a van down by the river.

I bought the backlinks for a site that received an average of about 1250 page views a day. Also, most posts appeared within the first page of Google SERP for the keywords they were written for…[I]n about a week from the date of purchase, traffic dropped 70%.

If you’re website is an integral part of your business, a 70% drop will kill you.

Plus, there’s no guarantee that the backlinks you buy will move you any higher in the Google rankings. Many backlinks come from low quality sites, which don’t do much in terms of rankings. Other times, backlink sellers will actually remove the links after some time, which then actually harms your ranking.

Bottom line: don’t buy backlinks. It’s stupid. And dangerous.

Create Your Own Private Blog Network

You can also create your own Private Blog Network, which is a relatively easy way to send backlinks to your own site.

This simply involves setting up a series of websites and then creating links on those sites that point to the content you want to rank.

It sounds like a simple and cheap way to get a ton of backlinks to your site and boost your rankings. And some people still swear by it, saying that as long as they diversify the backlinks and types of sites, they won’t be content.

But, like purchasing backlinks, you’re playing a loser’s game. The stakes are simply too high. If you get caught, you’ll be penalized, and at that point it’s game over.

Plus, you have to constantly work to outwit Google. They’re always getting smarter, which means you have to figure out new ways to beat them at their own game. If you want to play that game, be my guest, but don’t come whining to me when your site no longer shows up on Google.

Commenting, Posting In Forums, Etc.

Another common tactic for getting backlink is to make comments on blog posts and in forums which include a link back to your site.

This can make a small difference in your search rankings but doesn’t typically give much reward for all the time it requires. Two reasons why.

First, 99% of these types of links are nofollow, which is a type of link that’s not as valuable to Google. They can help some, but they won’t move the needle as much as a large amount of dofollow links. Basically, a nofollow link is like joining the Dungeons and Dragons club in high school: it doesn’t do a lot for your popularity.

Second, if Google sees that you have a disproportionate number of nofollow backlinks, they’re going to know what you’re up to and may not give you any boost in the rankings.

In the long run, spending hours hopping onto various blogs and forums won’t give you the kind organic search traffic you really want.

Guest Posting

A third popular option is guest posting. Basically, you offer to write a blog post for another site and include a link back to your own within the post. For example, if you sell vegan products, you could write a blog post for the site “Eat Clean or Die Trying” and include a link back to your organic enema kits.

This can work and can generate solid backlinks, but it suffers from one serious drawback: it’s hugely time consuming.

First, you have to generate the content. This means either you write it or you hire someone to write it. If you suck at writing, it will take you forever and read like some sort of Russian propaganda. If you hire someone, you’ll have to go back and forth with them over edits. Plus, it’s really hard to hire good writers. You have to sort through a lot of bad ones in order to find the good ones.

Second, you have to find a site that wants a guest post. This usually takes a lot of emailing and convincing editors that you have something to offer.

All this can take hours for only a single backlink. Trying to do this on a large scale becomes requires a huge amount of time.

Additionally, Google has said that they’re going to start coming down on guest blogging as a means of improving rankings. On his personal blog, Google’s Matt Cutts said:

So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy. In general I wouldn’t recommend accepting a guest blog post unless you are willing to vouch for someone personally or know them well. Likewise, I wouldn’t recommend relying on guest posting, guest blogging sites, or guest blogging SEO as a linkbuilding strategy.

Cutts did clear this up, saying that he was referring primarily to low quality, spammy guest posts that are solely designed for a backlink. But his point is clear: trying to build backlinks through guest posting simply isn’t a viable strategy long term.

Create Great Content Plus Outreach

The most effective method for getting a high number of backlinks is to create outstanding content and then reach out to other websites for links. On the surface, this can seem like self-promotion, but think through this for a moment.

Websites are always looking for great content to link to. Unfortunately, there’s an abundance of absolutely terrible, trashy, clickbait content out there. You know what I’m talking about. Articles like, “We Can Guess Your Deepest Secret Based On Which Spice Girl You Like Most”.

No one wants to link to this kind of content. It’s trash.

If you can create amazing, outstanding, over the top awesome content, people will want to link to it. Not just good content. Really, really good content. Unique, linkable content.

People like Brian Dean have perfected this technique. Using what he calls the “Skyscraper Technique”, Brian writes the absolute best version of any article out there and then posts it on his site.

He then reaches out via email to people he thinks might want to link to it. Using this technique, he generates a massive number of high powered backlinks for his site.

Even if you can’t write well or don’t have the time to perform the outreach, you can still make this happen.

You can hire a really good writer (not one you have to babysit) to write your content and then hire a virtual assistant to do the outreach for you. If you have access to the right tools, you can even automatically find the email addresses of people you think might be interested in your article.

If you’re technically savvy, you can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush to find the types of content that get the most backlinks.

Or, you can outsource all this work to an agency that can handle every aspect of this process, ensuring you get high quality, totally legit backlinks relatively quickly.

Great content plus large amounts of outreach almost always generates a ton of backlinks and raises your search rankings. This is the safest, most effective way to generate a lot of organic search traffic in a relatively short amount of time.

Don’t Play Fast and Loose

When it comes to link building, it’s tempting to take shortcuts. To buy backlinks and then pray to the SEO gods that Google doesn’t catch you. But this is almost a losing strategy. If you get seriously penalized, it can take you months to recover, if you can recover at all. You’ll lose almost all your organic traffic and have to rely solely on things like advertising to get anyone to your site. That can tank your business fast.

There are proven, straightforward methods for getting high quality backlinks. If you’re willing to do the work, guest posting can be very effective. Yes, it’s time consuming, but it really does work.

If you can build a system for creating great content and then performing outreach around that content, you can really up your game. You can take your organic search traffic through the roof.

We’ve provided a lot of services for a lot of clients over the 7+ years that we’ve been in business.

But now that we’ve drilled down into our two services of PPC and SEO link building, we have found that there’s still a lot of misunderstanding about SEO in 2017.

The field called search engine optimization has been around for 17 years and has seen a lot of changes over that time. But some things don’t change and so to know which part has changed is difficult to keep up with. I get that, but it still drives me crazy that people don’t understand the truth of the matter! So today I’m going to talk about how you can over optimize your contents and over optimize your website.

Now I have no data to back this up, so if you’re looking for a data-driven article this is not the one for you. If you’re looking for more of a theory hypotheses, a discussion or debate, read on!

For the longest time we’ve been doing search engine optimization; keyword selection, retitling, redoing content to make sure the keyword was on the page enough times. We’ve also been building backlinks, some with do follow, some with no follow, some with the keyword, some with just the naked URL, some with other things trying to make a “healthy mix”.

But it didn’t work. You can optimize every single piece of content on your website. You can make sure you have the checklist of ‘is the keyword here? or is the keyword here?’. You can run it through Yoast’s tool, Webceo, grader.com, all of these tests to make sure that you cross all your t’s and dot your i’s.

But, newsflash, that will not make your article, or your website, or your web page rank better.

First of all, you have to write engaging content that people want to digest, that people want to share, that people find value in. As a person who uses Google to solve problems, if I click on an article that’s in the search results that doesn’t answer my question I find it quite irritating. So think, if somebody looking for red Nike size 12 shoes should land on your page but you’re not selling Nike red size 12 shoes on that page, you’re going to annoy me. Word optimize all you want but in the end you have to make sure you’re writing engaging content, that you’re talking about things that people value, that you’re helping people solve problems with not 1, but 2, spot-on answers.

The second thing you need to focus on is marketing concept which I wrote about in our last post. It is something that is so critical for your business, for your optimization, for your website, for Authority, and in order to rank. You need to market that content so people see it, so people talk about it, so people share it, so people link to it, so people email it. Google wants to provide value to its users and you need to show Google that other people value this, therefore so should Google, and so should Google’s users.

So, when you spend so much time making sure the keywords are put in the right place, making sure that everything is perfectly optimized, I would argue you’re over optimizing.

Case in point – There are over two hundred ranking factors in the algorithm. One of them is the length of time your domain is registered. Google uses this to determine if this site is in it for the long haul. Not every website that is registered for one year is considered to be a throwaway website but it is one factor. So, does that mean that you need to rush out now and register your domains for 10 years and pay for that up front? It sure can’t hurt but it’s not going to significantly impact you either. It’s the same thing should you retitle all of your articles making sure that you have the keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible… Sure, it could help but it could also hurt because now the humans don’t want to read your content, they don’t value your content because the keyword is so obvious and it just doesn’t read well.

I used to play the role that I would operate for the machine – I would over optimize for Google and let the client pull me back, lowering my optimization so that it reads more human-like. But the funny part is, over optimization is where people focus. “Best Practice” in SEO is to make sure that everything is perfectly optimized, and that you need do everything you can to control all of this.

In the end, we need to wake up. We need to realize, those of us in the marketing community, that it’s more about how we can help people.

Actually, it’s a mission of my life is to help people. I want to help you. I want to help you know that you should not over optimize, that you should not waste your time and effort dotting every i and cross every t. My entire checklist should read ‘does this help people, and if so how do I get it in front of those people? Now you’re talking!

So welcome to 2017, we’re in the 4th quarter, it’s almost done! For 2018 I challenge you to write content that people care about, that’s going to matter to them and then share it, spread the word, get it out there. If you don’t have the time and energy to do that, hire somebody to do it for you, that’s totally fine but it needs to be a priority. Stop spending money on agencies that over optimize and stop spending your time and effort reviewing keyword reports.

Google has been pushing away from keywords, away from rank tracking. And in a way this is valuable information. If you look at it they’re actually trying to help those of us in the SEO community focus on the right things: creating incredible content that people want to share, content that helps people, content that answers questions.

So join me in 2018 in only producing content that challenges thoughts, that people want to share, that takes a stance, that is truly informative and that will beat everything else out there.

Hopefully, as I continue to blog here as the founder of Connex, I will continue to make things that are more useful. I will (hopefully!) get off my soapbox about all the things that are going wrong in the SEO community and I will provide value to you.

Join me in my challenge of creating incredible, valuable content that makes a difference in somebody’s life.

Connex Digital Marketing is on Pinterest!

]]>https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/over-optimized-seo/feed/0Are links still important today?https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/importance-of-links/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/importance-of-links/#respondWed, 04 Oct 2017 02:02:01 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28413The post Are links still important today? appeared first on Connex Digital Marketing.
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Many people often ask me if links are still important today. Perhaps you are wondering the same thing. I’m here to definitely suggest that yes, indeed, links are VERY important. But let’s take a look at the theory as to why.

How often have you been able to determine that a website is worthy without some sort of social indicators?

If you struggle, how do you expect Google to figure out that a site is authoritative when you remove the brand name? Is it just because they’ve optimized their content correctly, is it just because they’re exactly matching your keyword search, or is it because they truly are an authoritative website?

Really it’s all about who said the website is important, who actually refers to the website, how they refer to it and how many people are talking about it. These factors are what I talk about when I discuss authority indicators, links, backlinks and referring domains. There are lots of different ways to call these out to explain them but Google has to have some way to determine that one website is more important than another website.

So what would you do if you were Google? We’ve seen them try different things in the past.

They had an agreement with Twitter, and were able to get a lot of social signals. They also tried to conquer the social signal problem through G+ but that failed and Twitter stopped the agreement with Google. Professionally they’ve never had a good relationship with Facebook, but they’re constantly looking at social signals and using other tools and other techniques in other countries to make improvements. However, ever since Google was founded in 1998, they have used backlinks, sourcing, and citations to determine authority of a specific site, page or piece of content. Social Media changed that for a bit but we’re now back to just referring domains as a significant authority indicator.

10 years ago I talked to a lot of people about social media and how that was indicating an influence on people’s website because the more you were talked about on social media the more Google would see this as a relevant important quality website.

Back in the day, I actually named my company Connex Social for this reason, even though we didn’t offer social media management. We instead offered SEO services and yes, social media was to be the next authority signal for Google and SEO. However things have changed a lot since then. We’ve discovered that fundamentally, links are the way to achieve higher ranking within Google.

Three Audiences.

Google fundamentally has three audiences. The first audience is the users who search on it’s search engine. Because this is their primary audience they need to keep the searcher happy. Therefor, everything to do with search ranking is aimed at providing the user with the best answer right away. If they can’t do that, if they don’t make a pleasant experience for users, Google will fail so one of their goals is to make sure that they have the right answer at all times for user queries. It’s also why they try different things, to put the content and answers right on the Google results page.

Their second audience is advertisers. They want to keep their advertisers happy because they bring the money in and so they want to provide that space for those advertisers to get in front of users. This is really a whole other topic and I will write another blog post about advertisers and their working relationship with Google. Check out our Dialed in PPC service if you want to know more about that.

The third audience is actually you, the content producer – Somebody who has a website who wants to rank well in Google. Now, you’re actually what Google is offering to its users so as far as a client goes, they’re not going to bend over backward, but they do listen to you. So as they look at the three audiences, if they keep their first audience happy (the user) everything else will fall into place. Advertisers will come to have access to the primary audience of users who are searching the web for looking for something.

The Algorithm.

It’s ironic that users are looking at Google search results to help them figure out what they want.

Back in the day, the way to determine if a website was an authority was if it was linked to from other websites. Currently that’s a gross oversimplification of the algorithm.

However, after all the years of developing the 200 factors of the algorithm, they still boil down to three categories or buckets. Those buckets are Content, Links, and Code. Of these three, where should you spend the most effort? Which of these three move the needle and increase traffic/rank? Notice how “keywords” are not one of the main buckets that the 200 factors fall into. Yes “keywords” are some of the factors, but they fall into each of these three buckets, and are not the bucket themselves. If you’ve been paying attention to the updates of the algorithm over the years, you’ll have seen how Google has steadily moved away from keywords and will continue to do so with verbal search becoming present.

So, how are these buckets weighted?

45% of a page’s rank has to do with the content of the page.

45% of a page’s rank has to do with backlinks (internal, external, to the page, and to the domain).

10% of a page’s rank has to do with code and structure.

Take a moment and reflect on your SEO efforts, are you spending 45% of your effort on content and 45% on acquiring links with the remaining 10% of your effort focused around optimizing everything? Thinking of the Pareto Principle, if 20% of your effort goes into creating the content, 80% of your effort should go into marketing the content and one aspect of marketing is outreaching to influencers, outreaching to other website owners, to their social media users and requesting links and shares.

Yet most people focus on code, image alt tags, making sure the code and templates are coded correctly, checking their SEO Audits and verifying that everything is “optimized.” However they are missing the mark. They’re not able to find success and move the needle. They may be producing great content, but they neglect 45% of the factors. Mostly because it’s too hard.

What would life look like if for every article that took 4 hours to create you spent 4 hours acquiring links to it?

I’m here to tell you that your domain rank (DR) and moz Domain Authority (DA) would dramatically increase over the course of 6 months. And of course that would have a huge impact on your organic rank and organic traffic.

So yes, without a doubt links are still important today!

So, if you now know that links are so important and if you know that you should be marketing your concept better than you are today, I leave you with this question: What exactly are you doing about it?

Pin this to your favorite Pinterest board for easy reading!!

]]>https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/importance-of-links/feed/07 Crucial Questions To Ask Before You Hire An SEO Agencyhttps://connexdigitalmarketing.com/7-questions-to-ask-seo-agency/
https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/7-questions-to-ask-seo-agency/#commentsSun, 02 Jul 2017 20:10:28 +0000https://connexdigitalmarketing.com/?p=28027The post 7 Crucial Questions To Ask Before You Hire An SEO Agency appeared first on Connex Digital Marketing.
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Are you struggling to get links built? Maybe you don’t have an SEO vet on your team and yet you still need to get better rankings for your clients. Or maybe you just don’t know how to create SEO friendly content. Or maybe the subject of SEO feels like a gaping, confusing abyss, kind of like relationships except not quite as confusing.

When you’re confronted with these issues, you’re probably going to consider hiring an outside SEO agency to handle some or all of these tasks. But hiring an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agency can be confusing, right?

So many terms, so many options, so many different things to consider. If you’re not intimately familiar with SEO, it can seem like a terrifying, somewhat daunting ordeal.

To compound the problem, there are some low-life characters out there promising SEO snake oil. They stand in alleys, open their trench coats, and say, “Hey kid, wanna buy some rankings? Choose me and I’ll get you massive results for pennies on the dollar!”

It can feel like you’re walking through a hall of mirrors, trying to figure out what is real and what is an illusion. Or like you’ve taken a hallucinatory drug…but you wouldn’t know anything about that. Right?

Hiring an SEO agency doesn’t need to be this complicated. It shouldn’t feel like online dating, where you’re never sure if you’re getting a sweetheart or a sociopath with a weird doll collection.

If you know the right questions to ask, you can cut through the noise and get to the heart of what matters most.

Here are 7 absolutely essential questions to ask when hiring an SEO agency.

Question #1: Can You Explain What You’re Doing and How You’re Doing It?

Transparency is absolutely essential when hiring an SEO agency. Why? Because there are a lot of shady SEO agencies doing a lot shady practices which can create catastrophic problems for you. If you do a search on “SEO nightmares” you’ll find statements like this:

I hired them, they charged me a crazy amount of money, and then they outsourced most of the work.

These guys promised great results and instead my site got penalized by Google! Now I’m getting ZERO organic traffic.

I simply couldn’t understand what they were doing. They got results, but I’m terrified that something is going to happen.

They kidnapped my child. Wait, sorry, that’s from Taken.

When you are researching SEO agencies, you need to be able to understand what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Ask these questions to get to the heart of the issue:

What exactly will you be doing to improve my SEO results? If they don’t give you a clear, understandable answer to this question, get out of there faster than a vegan at a BBQ festival. There’s a good chance that they’re not telling you because they’re using Black Hat SEO Techniques, such as Private Blog Network link building, ghost keyword stuffing, tiny text, or paid links.

Here’s the deal: If Google finds out that your site is using these techniques to increase your SEO rankings, they’ll kill your site in search rankings. Google takes their service very seriously, and people who try to game the system can get their sites completely removed from Google search results. Like, gone gone, see you later, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

This is also why you should never go with ultra-cheap SEO solutions that seem too good to be true. For example, if an agency promises “100 High Quality Backlinks” within 1 month for only $40, you know they’re up to no good.

You need to know the specific tactics an SEO agency will be using to increase your search results. Otherwise, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.

Are you doing the work in-house? When you hire an SEO agency, they should be doing the work themselves rather than outsourcing it to a third party.

Several reasons for this. First, you want to ensure that the work being done is high quality. If the SEO agency you’re hiring outsources the work, there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually do a good job. There’s no guarantee that they won’t deploy Black Hat Techniques and then hide them. The more layers added to the work, the higher the odds that something will go wrong. You want to ensure that the agency you’re hiring is the one actually doing the SEO work.

Second, you want to know that you’re getting value and not simply paying for overhead. It’s not difficult for an SEO agency to inexpensively outsource your work overseas and then reap the extra profits. The result is you end up paying significantly more than necessary.

Transparency is crucial when you are hiring an SEO agency. If you can’t understand how they will be getting results for you, don’t hire them. They should be able to explain things to you in a relatively straightforward manner.

The same wisdom that applies to late night QVC purchases applies to SEO: If something seems too good to be true…it probably is.

Question #2: Can You Show Me Your Past Results?

Anyone can talk a big game when it comes to SEO, but the proof is in the rankings. In other words, an SEO agency should be able to give you tangible proof that they know what they’re doing and that they’ve had great success in the past.

If they don’t have demonstrable evidence of success, you have no reason to trust them. Don’t be mislead in thinking that since they showed past performance you will also receive that performance, there are always multiple variables at play. If, however, they cannot show past proof then get out of dodge!

So what sort of proof should they be able to show you? Several things:

Increased organic search traffic. Notice, this is a highly specific result. You don’t want to only see an overall general traffic bump, because that can come from anywhere, like social media or Reddit. It’s easy to generate traffic by spending a few dollars on PPC advertising on Facebook or Google. But that’s not what you’re after. You want people coming to your site on their own, not through ads or social media platforms.

Increased Conversions Around Key Search Terms. Unless you’re only trying to build traffic, one of the most important numbers when it comes to SEO is the number of conversions. You’re trying to increase search traffic so that buyers show up on pages that will ultimately lead to sales.

An SEO agency should be able to demonstrate that they have directed traffic which has maintained or increased the rate of conversions. For example if a site received 100 search visitors and 1 converted they have a 1% conversion rate. If the SEO agency increased that to 1000 visitors yet the conversions only increased to 5 that’s a conversion rate of 0.5%. This shows signs of poor quality traffic.

If they can’t show results of previous success stories, then there’s no guarantee they’ll help you achieve your SEO goals. Traffic without conversions is like coffee without caffeine: pointless.

Additionally, the SEO agency should be able to explain to you precisely how they achieved these results. This touches on the point about transparency. If the agency can’t easily show you how they achieved these results, stay far away from them. They may have purchased backlinks, or they may have used their own Private Blog Network, both of which Google hates more than Trump hates having small hands.

And in case we need to say it, Google penalizes that which they hate. Your goal should be to at all costs avoid known methods of triggering penalties. It’s what we’re trying to help you do by asking an SEO agency about these questions.

Also, an alarm should go off in your mind if they achieved big results really fast. The truth is, SEO is a slow and steady process, with big gains coming over longer periods of time. It takes Google a while to register changes and backlinks to your site, which means that search rankings often take months to increase.

A study by Ahrefs discovered that only 5.7% of pages moved into to the top 10 rankings within a year. As Tim Soulo wrote:

[W]e’ve shown that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year.

And most of the “lucky” ones, which do manage to get there, do it in about 2–6 months.

Actually, I shouldn’t be framing these pages as “lucky,” because the reason they got to the Top 10 in less than a year is most likely hard work and great knowledge of SEO, not luck.

When Soulo notes the “lucky” ones, he’s referring to pages that have a very strong profile of content, backlinks, and on page SEO (all of which we’ll get to in a bit). Those with a strong profile are much more likely to rank in less than one year.

In other words, if an SEO agency skyrocketed a website to a top ranking in anything less than 3 months (aka a crazy short amount of time) they better have a good explanation for it.

When asking for proof of results, don’t be afraid to ask for the hard numbers. An SEO agency could say they double traffic to a site, but that doesn’t mean anything if they increased it from 20 visits per year to 40. You need to know actual, detailed facts and figures.

Question #3: What Is Your SEO Philosophy?

It is general knowledge in the SEO community that Google has a whopping 200 different factors that influence where a page ranks in a given search result.

And while Google doesn’t tell us exactly how their algorithm works, we do know that it breaks down into three overall buckets:

Technical – Is your site coded properly and optimized so that Google can easily index it and evaluate the relevancy of the content? Are pages properly structured, do you have the right meta tags in place, and do you have keywords showing up where they should (H1, scattered throughout the body, etc.)? Google wants you to make their job easy.

Content –Does your site have quality content that actually relates to what people are searching for? Does it solve the reader’s problem? Is it sourced, plagiarized, or duplicated? Is the content of sufficient length, or is it only two paragraphs? Do people stay on your content when they discover it or are they quickly going to other sites? Does it contain the search terms the user has searched? Google cares very much about delivering the right search results. That’s why people use them and that’s how they make money.As R.L. Adams writes in Forbes:

The underlying content is extremely important. Too many people skimp on content, but it’s one of the major anchors that tether you to Google’s relevancy algorithms. Thin content with errors, or duplicate content and spun content can really hurt you. Instead, the content not only has to be lengthy, but it has to be well-written, keyword centric and highly engaging where readers are spending a good amount of time digesting and consuming that content.

Backlinks – Backlinks are links from other websites back to specific pages on your or your client’s sites. Google uses these links to determine just how important a page really is. Backlinks are a popularity vote, of sorts, in the eyes of Google. It’s kind of like the prom. Sites with lots of backlinks are the popular kids who have their choice of dates, while sites with few or no backlinks are the kids in the Dungeons and Dragons club.

If a lot of people link to a page, it must mean that it’s relevant to a lot of people. Incidentally, this is why Google gets so angry when people use artificial means to get backlinks. It artificially inflates the importance of a page.

In my opinion, technical SEO accounts for about 10% of why a page ranks, while content and backlinks each account for around 45%. In other words, technical SEO is important, but not nearly as important as the other two. Yet many SEO agencies have the focus completely wrong.

A Moz study of top 50 Google rankings for 15,000 keywords found the following:

Out of the top results, a full 99.2% of all websites had at least one external link [a.k.a backlink]. (The remaining .8% is well within the margin of error expected between Mozscape and Google’s own link index.) The study found almost no websites ranking for competitive search phrases that didn’t have at least a single external link pointing at them, and most had significantly more links.

In other words, if you want to rank, you need backlinks, and the primary way you’re going to get backlinks is with good content. After all, nobody wants to link to shoddy material or an obviously pushy sales page, or a spammy clickbait article. Your “Which Kardashian Are You” quiz may be important to 12 year-old girls but beyond that, nobody cares.

When you’re hiring an SEO agency, you need to understand their overall philosophy toward SEO. Are they simply going to come in and perform an SEO audit on your site? Is their main service fixing meta tags, optimizing for keywords, structuring pages appropriately, and repairing broken pages?

While a technical SEO audit is a valuable service, and one every site should have done at least once, it’s probably not going to move the needle to the degree you desire. It’s the 80/20 rule (actually the 90/10 rule) in action. If 90% of your rankings depend on content and backlinks, why are you spending 90% of your time, effort, and money on the technical side of things?

Additionally, an SEO agency that only does technical audits will likely get into trouble if more complicated problems arise, like a domain being penalized. In cases like that, changing meta tags and page structures is like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. While most SEO agencies that focus on the technical aspects alone should be able to help fix this problem, an audit alone will not be the correct tool and they will need additional tools.

Is the SEO agency’s philosophy:

We’ll improve your rankings by fixing all the technical errors on your site?

We’ll bring new backlinks to your site?

We’ll write better SEO-optimize content?

A combination of, or all of the above?

Ideally, an SEO agency will offer a holistic, well-rounded service, with appropriate weighting of the main ranking factors. If they do offer a well-rounded service, you need to know their experience within each element of SEO.

How long have they been doing backlink building and what quality of backlinks are they able to deliver? Do they create content for your site or do you need to create it? If they do create it, is going to be of the highest quality? Or is it farmed out to a non-native English writer?

If an agency claims its approach is content creation yet they’ve never done it, it’s like hiring a kidney specialist who spent his career in plastic surgery. It doesn’t work well.

Don’t be afraid to ask for samples of these things. Ask them to show you the sites where they’ve gotten backlinks. Ask them for samples of the content they’ve created. If they’re doing email outreach to gain backlinks, ask to see the templates they use.

You want to be confident that their SEO philosophy will yield the highest results for your site or your clients sites.

Question #4: How Long Have You Been In Business?

Knowing how long an agency has been doing SEO work can give you a good feel for how well they know the industry. It’s crucial to understand that SEO has changed in huge ways over the last decade, and those who have been in the industry the longest have a healthy sense of what truly works and what to stay away from.

Every few years, Google usually changes their algorithm that determines page rankings. They often do this in response to ways that people have gamed the system, trying to adjust their algorithm to reflect a page’s true value. Those who have been in the SEO game for years understand these changes, and know how to respond appropriately when these changes happen.

Additionally, those who thoroughly understand the world of SEO can, presumably, avoid the mistakes that can tank inexperienced SEO agencies. And if they do run into a challenge, there’s a good chance they’ve encountered it before and know what to do.

While length of years in business isn’t necessarily a make or break factor, it’s certainly one to consider. Experience is valuable, and those with it are often safer bets, especially since SEO is a long-term game and you are in business for the long term.

Question #5: What Is Your Pricing Model?

It’s essential to determine the pricing model of an SEO agency up front so that you don’t get gouged on the back end. Generally, you’ll find two different models offered by SEO agencies:

Estimate Model – You are given a general estimate of what the price will be but that price can change based on several factors depending on the specific pricing model. For example, a pay-for-performance model is when you pay based on the success of the SEO. The more organic traffic you get, the higher the price. There are also hourly consulting models where you pay for every hour the agency spends on your SEO work.

Fixed Price Model – You are given a set price and told exactly what you’ll be getting. Typically, this fixed price comes from the agency estimating how many hours are involved in the work and the amount of profit they need to make.

Hiring an agency that uses the estimate model can be risky, especially if you aren’t intimately familiar with the inner workings of SEO. Several problems can arise with the estimate model:

The project scope can balloon. If you have unexpected SEO problems with your site, it may take the agency more hours than anticipated to optimize things.

You can get ripped off. If an agency senses that you don’t understand what you’re doing, they can add in additional work and then claim it was necessary. Because you don’t know exactly what they’re doing, it’s difficult for you to protest. Or, the agency could royally screw up and not tell, simply passing on the extra hours to you.

You may not get what you thought you would get. If you don’t have everything clearly spelled out in advance, you may not get the services or results you expected.

You might stuck in a long-term contract. Depending on the pricing model, you may end up getting stuck in a long-term contract with no easy way out. If the service isn’t up to par, you may have to pay a substantive termination fee to end the contract. This is like those cable contracts where you basically have to give up your first-born child to terminate early.

Ideally, you should know what you’re getting and exactly how much you’re going to pay before you get into a contract with an agency.

If you don’t have these details nailed down, there’s a chance you could get burned.

Question #6 – Do You Offer White Label Services?

If you are a marketing agency that offers SEO services as part of marketing packages, you’re going to want to be able to white label any outsourced SEO services. In other words, you’re going to want to be able to put your brand on the services rather than pointing out that you’re actually using another agency to help with these services.

This point isn’t overly complicated. If you can’t white label the SEO work, your end client is going to be confused when you include another agency in your marketing package. Ideally, you want to be able to put your name and brand on the work done.

White labeling also means the SEO agency cannot include your client in their case studies or examples of success. This is very important as when a client finds their brand on a service they never paid for it can be quite a shock and come back to bite you in the long run.

Question #7: How Responsive/Avaliable Are You?

Again, this is not an overly complex question, but it’s crucial. You want an SEO agency that is very responsive to your questions and addresses problems in a reasonable manner, taking into account time zones, etc.

Hiring an agency that isn’t responsive can create massive headaches for you. For example, let’s say that, for some reason, you get penalized by Google and your search traffic completely drops off. No search traffic means no sales, and no sales means no income, and no income ultimately leads to you going out of business. I’m not saying they should get back to you within five minutes every time you have a slight worry, but they should definitely respond relatively quickly.

If you’re an agency and the end client runs into an SEO problem, you want to be able to address it ASAP, which means the SEO agency needs to be really responsive.

This is one of those common sense things that, much like those dogs in those sappy Sarah Mclachlan commercials, often gets neglected. Neglect it at your own peril.

Conclusion

Hiring an SEO agency shouldn’t scare the pants off you. Yes, you have to do some digging. Yes, you need to do some research. But the process can be much less complicated if you simply know what to ask and what you should expect to see.

Just because you may feel inexperienced doesn’t mean you should allow yourself to be pushed around. After all, it’s your company that’s at stake here. Your sales and conversions are on the line. In some ways, your reputation hinges on the performance of the SEO results.

Don’t leave it up to amateurs or underhanded characters. Hire the right people and get the right results.